The 2025 Hugo Awards: You Win Some, You Lose Some


Specifically, at least night's Hugo award ceremony held at the Seattle convention center, my book, Track Changes, did not win the Hugo for Best Related Work, but I did win—for the second time—the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. This last development was a total and delightful surprise, and as I expressed in my speech I had prepared no remarks against what seemed like an impossibly remote eventuality. As a result, I can't recreate my acceptance speech the way I did after winning Best Fan Writer in Helsinki in 2017 (though you can hear what I said in the official Hugo award ceremony stream, around the 40-minute mark). But the general gist of it was: I am grateful to the award's administrators and everyone who voted, deeply appreciative of my fellow nominees, and take this award as recognition of the importance of SFF criticism to the ongoing health and vitality of the field.

I was disappointed not to win Best Related Work for a book that I am incredibly proud of, but I think its journey—nominations for the Hugo, Locus, and British Fantasy Award, as well as winning the British Science Fiction Association award—has been a tremendous adventure. And I am absolutely thrilled that the winner of the Best Related Work category is Jordan S. Carroll's Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, a cogent and necessary work on the way that science fiction attracts and reinforces the prejudices of the far right. Best Related Work is often a grab-bag category, and it's always great to see serious, book-length criticism and commentary win it.

A glance at this year's voting stats (the nomination stats have yet to be released) reveals that Track Changes was never seriously in the running for the Best Related Work award (in fact, it appears that the same hundred people—or, as I will henceforth be calling them, the Nuss-Hive—put me first in both Best Related Work and Best Fan Writer, which was enough to sway the lower volume category of the two). But, when the votes for my book were redistributed, they went overwhelmingly to Speculative Whiteness and helped secure its win. I take this as an indication that there is a critical mass of Worldcon fans who value SFF criticism, and as an encouragement to continue doing that work, and searching out other excellent sources of it like Carroll's book.

As I write this post, the Seattle Worldcon is winding to a close. I am still untangling my thoughts about the con, but overall I would call it a very impressive effort. The Seattle convention center is an absolutely marvelous building and perfectly suited to the con's needs, and after getting used to slightly more petite European Worldcons, it was exciting to get to wander the immense dealers' room and art show. I wish I could have been on more programme items—a miscommunication led to me only being on two items—but the ones I were on were a lot of fun, and I attended several excellent panels as well. There were some problems: tech issues plagued the entire weekend (and my understanding is that virtual attendees have even more to say on this score), and the gaffe-prone Hugo award ceremony quickly crossed the line from charmingly shambolic to infuriatingly so. In the coming days and weeks we'll no doubt have more in-depth post-mortems of the con's successes and failures, but for my part—as someone who was a little uncertain about traveling halfway around the world to a con where most people I know would not be attending, where the odds were high that I would lose not one but two Hugos—I am ultimately glad I made the trip. The Seattle Worldcon is likely to be the last convention I'll attend in a while, and it was certainly a high note to go out on.

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