The 2021 Hugo Awards have just been announced at the 79th Worldcon (DisCon III) in Washington, DC, USA.

They’re a bit late; Worldcons are usually held in August.

As far as the fiction goes the nominees were (the award winners are in bold.)

Best Novel

Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse (Gallery / Saga Press / Solaris)
The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tordotcom)
WINNER: Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor Books / Solaris)

I read the Jemisin for Interzone and posted my review here. The Roanhorse, Kowal and Clarke novels are on my tbr pile. Judging by The Calculating Stars I wouldn’t have expected The Relentless Moon to have been on the short list.

I have read none of the below.

Best Novella

Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
WINNER: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
Finna, Nino Cipri (Tordotcom)
Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom)
Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey (Tordotcom)

Best Novelette

“Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super,” A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2020)
“Helicopter Story,” Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020)
“The Inaccessibility of Heaven,” Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2020)
“Monster,” Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2020)
“The Pill,” Meg Elison (from Big Girl, (PM Press)
WINNER: “Two Truths and a Lie,” Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com)

Best Short Story

“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse,” Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020)
“A Guide for Working Breeds,” Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris))
“Little Free Library,” Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com)
“The Mermaid Astronaut,” Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020)
WINNER: “Metal Like Blood in the Dark,” T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020)
“Open House on Haunted Hill,” John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots – 2020, ed. David Steffen)

The shortlists for this year’s Hugo Awards have been announced. Amazingly I have actually read some of these (the ones in bold the one also in italics as an extract only, in the BSFA Awards 2019 booklet) – partly due to Interzone, but also becasue I read Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation towards the end of last year.

Since the Worldcon (at which these awards are presented) which was to take place in New Zealand has been cancelled for attendees I assume the ceremony will now have to be virtual, as will the con itself.

The nominations are:-

Best Novel

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)

Best Novella

“Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes (Saga Press/Gallery)
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com Publishing)
In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press; Jo Fletcher Books)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager; Hodder & Stoughton)

Best Novelette

“The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019)
“Away With the Wolves”, by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019)
“The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019)
Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection (Amazon))
“For He Can Creep”, by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019)
“Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))

Best Short Story

“And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
“As the Last I May Know”, by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
“Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
“A Catalog of Storms”, by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
“Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
“Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)

Best Series

The Expanse, by James S. A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
InCryptid, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
Luna, by Ian McDonald (Tor; Gollancz)
Planetfall series, by Emma Newman (Ace; Gollancz)
Winternight Trilogy, by Katherine Arden (Del Rey; Del Rey UK)
The Wormwood Trilogy, by Tade Thompson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

These were announced at the Worldcon in Dublin at the weekend.

As far as fiction goes they were:-

BEST NOVEL: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

BEST NOVELLA: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

BEST NOVELETTE: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho (B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, 29 November 2018)

BEST SHORT STORY: A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow (Apex Magazine, February 2018)

BEST SERIES: Wayfarers by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton/Harper Voyager)

I have read none of these.

That “Best Series” award shows that the Hugos are little more than a popularity contest and not an indicator of merit. I read the first of Becky Chambers’s novels and was put off her writing for life.

This year’s Hugo winners (for stories published last year) were announced at the Worldcon in Helsinki.

BEST NOVEL: The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)

BEST NOVELLA: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)

BEST NOVELETTE: The Tomato Thief, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)

BEST SHORT STORY: Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)

I’m afraid I’ve read none of them. How much the balloting was affected by the Sad Puppies I don’t know and can’t tell.

I usually read all the stuff about fiction in the Guardian’s Saturday Review as well as some of the non-fiction reviews.

Last week’s contained three items of particular interest to me.

The cover piece, Steven Pinker’s An Anti-stickler’s Manifesto was about ten “grammar rules” he thinks it’s okay to break sometimes. He says that some of them aren’t actually rules at all and others aren’t rules in English. You may be surprised to read that by and large I agree with him. But I do believe it is important to know what the rules are. This is in order that when you break them it is for a purpose.

Then there was an article about Martin Amis. In this Amis was quoted as saying, “Prose is foremost, and ‘if the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form.'” Secondary interests? Psychological insight is a secondary interest? Story is a secondary interest? Characterisation is a secondary interest? Is this last not what certain purveyors of genre (no names, no pack drill) are pilloried for not providing?

The final piece was an interview with George R R Martin, in London for the Science Fiction Worldcon after first appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Edited 3/10/13:-
The flickr account I previously linked to in this post has disabled the sharing facility. The set of pictures is still viewable on flickr via this link or for each photo click on the relevant links below.

Re-edited 12/12/16. The pictures have become embeddable again so I have done so.

Original post:-
Various memorabilia were made for the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, 1938; a lot of them containing representations of the Tower of Empire.

The Exhibition’s logo though was, like that of the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924 and 1925, a lion. The Wembley lion was what is heraldically known as statant. Since in 1938 the Exhibition was being held in Scotland the 1938 lion was of course rampant.

Colour images of the 1938 Exhibition are rare but this was what the Empire Exhibition’s entrance gates looked like – complete with lion logo. (Photos below taken from Flickr – though I’d seen them on display at the last Glasgow Worldcon in 2005. A set of coloured photographs of the Exhibition had come to light a year or so previously after having been in a drawer or something for 60+ years.) As always the Tower of Empire is conspicuous in the background.

And there’s a night time view of the entrance taken from much the same angle.

One of the features of the Exhibition was the coloured lights not only on the buildings but also in the fountains and on the Tower.

Ian Sales has been complaining about the latest Hugo Awards.

This is a subject nobody outside the SF world (not to mention many inside it) gives a toss about but to others it’s important. The Hugos claim to identify the best SF in any particular year but as Sales says the categories are now somewhat out of date and their boundaries can be obscure.

I used to pay some attention to them as a guide to what to seek out to read – and later when an acquaintance/friend was up for one of them. This year’s mainly passed me by. The results are here.

Since only attendees of any year’s Worldcon (Worldcon = the annual world SF convention) or its supporting members (financial contibutors who cannot attend) have a vote in the nominations or final ballot the awards are in essence a popularity contest so not necessarily giving an indicator as to quality.

The main flaw though is that since the Worldcon is usually held in the USA – and even when it isn’t – most of its members are from the US. This means they are and always have been essentially USian awards. This is historically inevitable since the US was the largest SF market and largest source of writers. But it does unlevel the playing field.