#Hugo Winners
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[image description: A black pony with large rust-brown eyes and a smiling pumpkin on her hip stands on golden and orange fall leaves. Behind her, the dark sky is filled with stars and her flaming orange mane shines brightly against the blues of night. Text reads “24, The Small God, Pumpkin Spice”]
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People assume she’s a newcomer, a fad, a frivolous flash in the pan. But she was there when the first pumpkin pies were being baked; she was there when the first colonist cookbook was published, in 1769. She was there when the British raided the rest of the world for flavors they could steal, and while her appearance may be sweet and adorable, her hooves are soaked in the blood of empire, for without conquest, she could never have been born.
But people, unwilling to consider the structure beneath the surface, look at her and see only big eyes, a flowing mane, a coat as soft as silk and as dark as midnight, and they mock her adherents, call them “basic” as if anything could be considered truly basic when it had been built through so many crimes.
Every piece of her was stolen. Every pinch and particle was the subject of a terrible war. The price of cinnamon is slaughter. The fee for nutmeg is subjugation. And now we serve her sacraments with whipped cream and sugar sprinkles, as if both those things had not also been stolen at some point, as if a foamy cloud could somehow clean the blood from those long lashes.
In these modern days, her most common manifestation is blended with sweet cream and coffee—a drink that has many gods of its own, that has sparked even more wars than her cinnamon pungency. But for most of her time, she has been carried in the pie.
Pumpkin pie. The ultimate jewel in the crown of colonialism. Cooking techniques from Europe, spices stolen from India, Asia, and the Middle East, and a vegetable crown taken from the Americas, sliced and mashed and mixed until its wildness is lost, subsumed into custardy blandness, become one with the melting pot.
She’s not a newcomer. And she’s not nice, either, and so few of those who worship her understand, anymore, that she’s not a god of whimsy or basic delights.
She is, now and always, a god of war.
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Please join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:
WordPress: https://leemoyer.wordpress.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/smallgodseries/
Homepage: http://smallgodseries.com
Mastodon: @[email protected]
#Small Gods#smallgodseries#Seanan McGuire#Lee Moyer#icons and stories#pumpkin spice#thanksgiving#God of War#Icon#Hugo Winners#Hugo Awards#tiny divinities#colonialism
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AND THEN I WAS A FAN
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1982
There was a time when I made a point of reading Hugo Award winners as soon as a given year’s WorldCon results were announced. (Assuming I hadn’t already read that book – which was a rare thing.) That’s a habit I’ve lost over the past twenty or so years, and with a very few exceptions, I haven’t really been keeping…
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He could not make up his mind whether she was a human being, a fairy, or an angel.
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)
#cosette this eponine that#esmeralda is the only clear winner in the hugo bracket challenge#i don't talk about her as much because les miserables is my book of choice#but when it comes to who is just OBJECTIVELY the best - esmeralda#by all means esmeralda!#notre dame de paris#victor hugo#literature
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THE EXPANSE (2015-2022)
HUGO AWARD WINS (& 3 NOMINATIONS)
#the expanse#theexpanseedit#syfysource#scifiedit#i was going to do the nominations too but i was too tired#anyway three times hugo award winner !!#a one time for the books as a series i think#my belovedss
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One Dress a Day Challenge
November: Oscar Winners
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / Hugo Weaving as Anthony "Tick" Belrose (Mitzi Del Bra)
Year: 1994
Designer: Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner
In a movie full of flamboyant costumes, this minidress adorned with pink and orange flip-flops definitely stands out for its original materials. It's got a definite 1960s vibe, between the length, the colors, and the "pop art" feel to it. Accessories include matching earrings, knee-high "gladiator" sandals, a cotton-candy-pink wig, and many large rings.
This was the first movie I ever saw Hugo Weaving in, so he wasn't cemented as "Agent Smith" in my mind, as he seems to have been for those who first encountered him in The Matrix. Consequently, I had no trouble shifting to viewing him as Elrond in the LOTR movies.
#the adventures of priscilla queen of the desert#oscar winners#hugo weaving#movie costumes#one dress a day challenge#one dress a week challenge#1990s fashion#1990s style#1994 movies#1994 films#australian movies#australian film#australian cinema#priscilla queen of the desert#tim chappel#lizzy gardiner#multicolor#academy award winner
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General Colville in the eleventh hour at Waterloo: “You have fought well, brave Frenchmen! Surrender!”
A relatively unknown French officer named Cambronne: “Shit!”
Beloved author and certified Frenchman, Victor Hugo, forty-ish years later:
#les mis#les miserables#victor hugo#the brick#like okaaayyyyyy Cambronne let’s get it King#only winner at Waterloo!!!#lm 2.1.15#Victor heard that and went “Shakespeare
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I have been following the Hugo Award scandal the whole time, mostly via my mother, and I know "evil Chinese government censorship" is a whole conspiracy theory model, but also: the Chinese government does have censorship and media standards, and
WorldCon 2023 and the Hugo Awards did take place in China with official support and hype as an event
and the voting statistic numbers could be "one or more mistakes covered up clumsily by multiple people" - they're certainly the latter part
but the impossible statistics are not the scandal.
The scandal is that multiple works were rejected as "ineligible" even though they were very much eligible, including the frontrunner for Best Novel, which we know was eligible because it had just won the Nebula (why it was the frontrunner) which currently has the same standards. Multiple, across multiple categories. That would be a hell of a mistake.
It and two other works rejected are by diaspora Chinese people. (Again, different categories.) That doesn't prove anything, but when people started going "what the hell happened", a pattern is a pattern.
So when it turns out via leaked emails that the English-language members of the committee were indeed feeling the need to check for "anti-China elements" in nominated works
that's not a conspiracy theory and it never was. it is, in fact, more likely that entries were deliberately rejected due to either active or passive censorship, than that someone's fingers slipped five times in the same way during the same process and they decided not to fix any of them.
#people were asking where Babel was back when the finalists were released#there's HUGE overlap between Nebula voters and Hugo voters#so for the winner of one to not even make the list of the other?#people asked questions!
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My Hugo Award thoughts:
Best Novel: Nettle and Bone
this makes sense to me! It was my second choice (and my first choice, Nona the Ninth, is a controversial entry in controverial series) (controversial in that people tend to either love or hate them). I think I've made it clear that I think this year's Novel nominees were weak: while this was at the top of the nominees it is nowhere near the best sff novel of last year.
Best Novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go
this one confuses me. I very much like Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, but I don't think this was one of the best of that series, and it is heavily context dependent. It's a good novella! But the novella category was so strong this year that I don't know why it won. This was actually my lowest ranked novella. My first choice was Ogres, with Into the Riverlands as a close second.
Best Novelette: The Space-Time Painter
Confession time: I did not read this or include it in my rankings. There was no English translation provided, and I was running low on time and energy and didn't machine-translate it myself. Sorry. That said, I've heard good things about it elsewhere, and it is of course nice to have a work from the host country/language win. My vote was for Murder by Pixel, and in general I thought this was a good category.
Best Short Story: Rabbit Test
yeah this was always going to win. Excellent short story, well written and topical, it was my top vote. I'm interested to see how the voting metrics break down: this category was a mix of chinese and english entries, and I'm curious as to how that impacted results.
Best Series: Children of Time
YES! YESSSSS! This category was incredible this year, six well-deserving nominees, very hard for me to choose between them. But this was my top vote (a hard decision), and I'm delighted it won. Three hefty volumes of the best kind of drawn out philosophical science fiction, deeply moving, with incredible worldbuilding and alien minds. This was absolutely the highlight of works I read because they were nominated.
Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes
No surprise here, Terry Pratchett is beloved and this book was well written. This was in my top three, which I had a very hard time choosing between and all I would have been happy to see win. My own top vote ended up going to Chinese Science Fiction, an Oral History, which was also the only work I couldn't read, aside from the translated introduction and table of contents. I voted for it on the grounds that what was translated made an excellent case for it being an important work, not just a good one, digging into the history of science fiction in China in a way that had never been done before, and I felt that nonfiction about a specific person or movie, no matter how well-written or informative, couldn't compete with that scope.
Professional Artist: Enzhe Zhao and Fan Artist: Richard Man
this is fine! Neither was my top pick, but both were near the top, and I will freely admit I know little about art.
Lodestar (Not a Hugo): Akata Woman
Not my top pick, but a perfectly good winner. I suspect my ranking of it suffered from a) being in a reading slump that made me have to push to get through it and b) this being the conclusion of a trilogy I last read six years ago, and remember very little of. There were a lot of moments of resolving emotional conflicts that I had no context for, which left the book a little flat. My top vote was for The Golden Enclaves, which I think was by far the best nominee, but also dubiously qualified (while the books, especially the earlier ones, certainly feel like YA, and center around teenagers in a magical high school, they are published as adult fantasy). My runner up was Into the Serpent's Wake, the sequel to Tess of the Road, a book I am still bitter did not win in the first year of the Lodestars.
Astounding (Not a Hugo): Travis Baldree
... ok. I do not get the hype for Legends & Lattes, and by extension Travis Baldree. The book was delightful! But it was also fluff, not something that provoked any strong thought or emotion, not any great work of prose, not innovative or creative in any new way that would mark a rising new author. This was my lowest ranked nominee (leaving out Weimu Xin, whose work did not have an english translation). This would be less disappointing, given I found most of the nominees so-so, were it not for Isabel J. Kim, whose short stories were miles above any of the other nominees.
Other Awards:
I didn't vote in the other categories, or read/watch/listen to their nominees. Nothing in their results jumps out at me, though I'm happy EEAAO won.
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Read the abridged version of the brick??? Ummm actually mama didn't raise a QUITTER
#winners never quit and quitters never win#yeah tell me about the sewers for 6 chapters im GENUINELY INTERESTED#cant get enough of that religious imagery in the first book thats all about the bishop of D#this isn't a joke I'm actually just a nerd#les mis#victor hugo#les miserables
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stars at the dance off part 2: teens & seniors
#this set took me like 3 days to make for what#also 16 dancers in top 10 is insane#plus 7 in top 3 and 3 winners#not to mention everyone else in top 20#just sad i didn’t get to gif bella :(#giselle gandarilla#catherine clayton#sophie garcia#kylan wright#nick bustos#hugo silva#destanye diaz#jackson roloff hafenbreadl#sam fine
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I also think that hs/the hs fandom was responding to the way the internet was in the early 2010s. it's probably a cycle of influence but I will say that with books like htn whose authors originally wrote like. complex gothic sff angst fic, that type of writing isn't limited to the hs fandom at all. There was a whole time period where if your fandom was even a little sff oriented you would have people writing these epic fics with fantasy elements where two characters would have a wildly complex and fraught relationship destroying everything else in their path for the same amount of words as the holy bible. It's so hard to describe this vibe but I'd say like, gothic sff melodrama with unreliable narrators really had a moment in fandom in the hs time period. Some of that stuff influences the way I think about fiction to this day and like. I do believe muir a little when she says she didn't take anything in particular from hs because even though there are some similar choices she makes in her writing, that was kinda just the vibe back then too
#i mean i can't speak for everyone but tbh?#htn reminded me of the d*ath note classic those who stand for nothing etc etc#like. the absolutely unrelenting portrayal of mental illness the supernatural elements that are like#hidden away in there underneath a story about awful parties#until htn nothing really had topped that fic for me as far as horrible party scenes and unreliable narrator#i think harrow is a more sympathetic protagonist than light in any universe but you know#oh btw if you look up the fic content warning everything. much like tlt#it is quite literally longer than the bible last it was updated#laura had some stuff come up but i maintain that if she ever wrote a novel it would be the next hugo winner
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one of my summertime hobbies is going into used bookstores on the beach and specifically seeking out two things: the weirdest golden age/new wave science fiction i can find, and old noir and hardboiled detective novels/magazines. generally the latter is a much rarer find because it's on the whole older (and i find a lot more new wave scifi than golden age, although a fair amount in the 50s cusp) but i haven't read a lot in english the last couple of years so i have amassed a pretty hefty quantity of scifi books of extremely dubious quality. time to take the plunge into my current collection and see what i can find
#sadly one of the bookstores we like to frequent has downsized its genre fiction significantly#and tori was like im sorry i coudlnt find you any Bad scifi..... but heres a short story collection of hugo winners from the 50s and 60s
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The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1981
History is a pageant of changes, recorded both in the events that create and drive those changes, and in the lives of the people caught up in them. Some of the changes are cyclic, and some are one and done; some of those can break the cycles. I’m a sometime student of history, and one of my favorite nonfiction genres is narrative history. A good…
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Robert Silverberg - Moonferns & Starsongs - Ballantine - 1971 (illustration by Gene Szafran)
#witches#french heels#occult#vintage#nebula winner#hugo winner#ballantine#moonferns#starsongs#robert silverberg#gene szafran#1971#moonferns & starsongs#ballantine books
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I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.
– Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
#book quote of the day#amal el mohtar#max gladstone#this is how you lose the time war#lgbtq literature#sapphic#sci-fi#time travel#epistolary novel#epistolary#hugo award winner#nebula award winner#BSFA award winning#book quotes
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here is my recommended reading order of novik's work:
Spinning Silver
Uprooted
and then interchangeable between Temeraire series (9 books) or The Scholomance (3 books), depending on whether you like pride and prejudice but instead of romance it's the platonic perfection of a bond between man and dragon or YA fantasy where the magic school is trying to kill you (a series that restored my faith in a genre)
#naomi novik#book rec#actually author rec#all her books are very different imo#a rarity for an author#like seriously. so different. but spinning silver is the nebula winner and hugo nominee and a buncha other awards for a good reason#that being said i think temeraire might be my fav. practically a comfort series at this point. lawrence and temeraire got me in a chokehold#i honestly think you cannot judge that series until you've read all nine books#because its like. the best series ever. i've never felt the plot development and character development grow and expand so organically#and seamlessly across NINE FUCKING BOOKS and then WRAP UP AMAZINGLY SATISFYINGLY#like. oh my god. thinking about it has me on the floor
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