33 Comments on “The 2019 Hugo Award Finalists”

1. Hey, looks like this Worldcon took your suggestion from way back when to release the finalists not on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter! Do you think this might be a more permanent change?

   Also excited to catch up on several of the nominees!

2. Thanks! Now to add all those I haven’t read (most!?!) to my Want To Read list.

3. Janelle Monae and Lindsay Ellis are now both Hugo nominees and that’s pretty damn great.

   (Really, the Dramatic Presentations and Related Work categories are killer this year; that’s a lot of good stuff.)

4. Have the pups finally run off into the woods?

5. ZOMG that best dramatic long form slate! Just brutal. Have fun, Hugo voters!

6. ZOMG that long form dramatic slate! Just brutal. Good luck, Hugo voters!

7. T. Kingfisher = Ursula Vernon, for anyone who keeps track of her :)

8. Apropos of very little, save that she did win an award or two, Vonda McIntyre just died. :(

9. Woah! Notice how many of these authors are women? F**k the sad puppies.

10. So very many wonderful names! I’m particularly excited for SPACE OPERA, but congratulations to all! What a wonderful time… and enjoy Ireland!!!

11. My book club’s suggested readings list is about to get a lot bigger!

12. Wow, surprised “Incredibles 2” didn’t make the cut but happy “Sorry To Bother You” did.

    Also happy the “Doctor Who” episodes “Rosa” and “Demons of the Punjab” made it. Not only were they two of the strongest episodes from Jodie Whittaker’s first season as The Doctor, but their nominations are a rebuke to the jerks who hated having to acknowledge the history of non-white people.

13. As a white male, I feel thoroughly under-represented by these nominees. If I hadn’t been over-represented in the Hugos for the first 45 years or so of my life, that might bother me. As it is, I’ll just take it as an opportunity to learn about and enjoy the works of talented authors that may have previously escaped my notice.

    I am quite pleased, as well, to see Sorry to Bother You nominated. That was an extraordinary film that deserves the attention.

14. I noticed the lack of nominees from the traditional magazines—Analog, Asimov’s, etc. I thought it a bit sad that the media that fed my love for the genre when I was growing up and not able to find much in local libraries has moved into the backwater of the genre.

15. I’m sure these are all very good stories – I can certainly vouch for those I have read, anyway – but in aggregate, it seems to me that Hugos are becoming extremely insular and utterly dominated by a very specific monoculture, literary/political approach, and set of preoccupations. (I mean, even moreso than before.) I would really like to see the nominators branch out a little bit, into authors and types of stories that are a little bit different.

    Again, no shade meant against the individual nominees, who I’m sure are all excellent. But on the whole, this shortlist does not strike me as very dynamic.

16. I’m sure someone checked, but is the wonderful Binti: The Night Masquerade really under 40k words? It is 195 pages by the ebook pagination[page 9-203].

17. I would have a tough time making a top choice in several categories here, most notably Dramatic Presentation – Long Form and Best Series. In each case, I think my third choice is pretty good in its own right, to say nothing of whatever I ranked above them.

18. SOOOO happy to see The Calculating Stars among the novel finalists! It has been a long, long time since I last read a book cover-to-cover at a sitting to see how the story wound up, and then immediately went back to the first page and read it again more slowly just to enjoy the superlative writing. That is a well-deserved nomination!

19. Wow, this year’s listings are so good. It’s going to be so hard to decide! I’m especially amazed that Ao3 got a nomination as it’s so often ignored ’cause it’s “just” fanfiction. And I loved Trail of Lightning, still waiting impatiently for the next book. ^^

20. They gave up a year or two ago. Looking at the novel list, you can really see it. I doubt they would approve of a single one.

21. Of the novels, I have read three – Novik, Valente, and Kowal – and less of the other categories. All three novels were quite excellent and I’d not begrudge any of them the win. My personal favorite was Novik’s fairy tale, which (not coincidentally) I also think represents the most significant stylistic and thematic departure.

22. Five women and an Asian dude nominated for Best Novel. I can hear the Puppy heads exploding from here, with a backing track of their pitiful wails that “we just don’t caaaaaare….”

    Awesome. I’m heading off to add these to the ever expanding TBR pile.

23. Martha Wells’ Murderbot series is some of the best scifi writing in years. Love it all! I’m just about guaranteeing she wins for best novella with Artificial Condition.

24. I’ve read/watched and enjoyed lots of these. Voting this year is gonna be tough…

25. I’m sure these are all very good stories – I can certainly vouch for those I have read, anyway – but in aggregate, it seems to me that Hugos are becoming extremely insular and utterly dominated by a very specific monoculture, literary/political approach, and set of preoccupations. (I mean, even moreso than before.)

    This would have been just as pertinent in the 1970s and 1980s as now.

26. A wonderful list !! Love it that women, writing under female names, are getting recognition today.

    So many well known authors of the early days of SF were women using pseudonyms to work. A Shame.

27. Though, damn, the Dramatic Long Form is pretty packed.There are AT LEAST three that I’d have no qualm winning.

28. So many great things on there! I’m just tickled about Ao3’s nomination, though. It’s about time they got this kind of recognition for the massive amount of work they’ve put in and the service it provides.

29. There are some brutally tough calls here–multiple categories just choked with superb things.

30. ‘m a bit puzzled in that the Ha Lee and Chambers books are each #3 of a series. Isn’t it hard to judge volume 3 without the context of v1 and v2? But if you do judge them in their contexts, won’t they have an advantage (of depth of characterization and setting) over a one-off? At least the Roanhorse is #1 of a series…

31. @Owns 9 Fedoras

    The third book in the Chambers series has only a few connections to books 1 and 2, beyond the general background. For instance, a relative of one of the characters is in book 1.

32. There have been a lot of “Book X of the series” on the shortlist before. Some have even won. In most of those cases, though, the books have worked as standalone stories, despite being part of a series. Some obvious examples with multiple instances include novels in the Vorkosigan Saga (Louis McMaster Bujold) and the Alliance/Union series (CJ Cherryh).

    The earliest one I know of was 1966’s Skylark DuQuense by EE “Doc” Smith, which was the fourth book in that series.

33. “Style of comment” note: In the little classic “The Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White, which of course is for traditional media rather than social media or blog comments, they advise spelling out abbreviations in full the first time an abbreviation is used. (Or explaining it in brackets) Their reasoning is that even if an abbreviation is super-obvious there are new babies being born every day who don’t know it yet.

    To put it another way: Out of the literally thousands of Scalzi readers, there are bound to be a few who don’t know what A03 means. Which I won’t explain (sorry) because neither do I.