This post has been prompted by two things. One of them is the magnificent series of sixteen File 770 posts by Heather Rose Jones on the history of the Best Related Work Hugo category and its predecessors, which itself is worthy of a nomination for next year. The other was a question asked by Paul Weimer to the Octothorpe team in the latest Octothorpe episode (at 17:54):

When was the last time a Hugo administrator actually knocked something out of Best Related Work?

Strictly, the answer is 2023, when two nominees were disqualified by the Hugo administrators of Chengdu Worldcon. These disqualifications were less controversial than in some other categories (a low bar, and it’s bitterly ironic that I write this in answer to a question posed by Paul Weimer of all people), and indeed it’s one of the categories where the numbers look less suspicious overall (also a low bar – there is still a weird “cliff” effect between the nominating figures reported for the top seven nominees, which reportedly got between 119 and 221 votes, and the rest, none of which got more than 38).

The two disqualifications were for The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, which had originally been published in 2020 and so misses the date eligibility window, and for 20 世纪中国科幻⼩说史 (History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century), on the grounds that one of its authors was on the Hugo subcommittee. The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was one of the finalists listed on the incorrect ballot briefly published and then unpublished by Chengdu Worldcon on 2 July 2023, replaced by Buffalito World Outreach Project, by Lawrence M. Schoen, when the official ballot was released on 6 July. But the evidence for its 2020 publication date is clear.

The recorded contributors to History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century are Xia Jia, Fei Dao (pen-name of Jia Liyuan), Wu Yan, Ren Dongmei, Xiao Han. Jiang Zhenyu and Wang Yao. Yang Zai’s very detailed analysis of the 2023 Hugos points out that Jiang Zhenyu was also listed as co-head of the Hugo Executive Team, along with Dave McCarty, by the Chengdu Worldcon website (which is no longer available). So again, it seems a fair cop.

There were no disqualifications in Best Related Work in 2024, 2025 or 2026. We did have one potential Best Related Work finalist in 2024 who declined nomination (Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood), the only recorded occasion when that has happened in this category.

However, I think that Paul Weimer’s question is more about what he calls “the lack of hard boundaries” for the category. The only disqualification in the regular Hugos for failing to match the category criteria that I’m aware of was in 2002; L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XVII, edited by Algis Budrys, was disqualified with the following note:

The Hugo rules state that a Related Book must be “…non-fictional, or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fiction text.” The ConJosé Hugo administrators felt that, under this rule, the 17th Annual Writers of the Future Anthology did not qualify for this category.

The administrators were John Lorentz, Ruth Sachter and Kevin Standlee. I think that they made the right call. It’s worth noting perhaps that Writers of the Future XVII was at the very bottom of the ballot, and thanks to its elimination and a tie for next place, two more works became finalists. (Heather Rose Jones notes that J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century may have also been ineligible, because of its 2000 publication date. If so, I think this was probably a simple error by the 2002 administrators.)

I don’t know of any other case in the regular Hugos, but in 2020 we disqualified The Book of Thoth, by Aleister Crowley, from the 1945 Retro Hugos, on the grounds that it was not sufficiently related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom to be eligible in this category. It had only six nominating votes and was bottom of the EPH count (just as Writers of the Future XVII was at the bottom in 2002); removing it allowed Leigh Brackett’s The Science Fiction Field onto the ballot, and indeed that actually won the award.

The Hugo team that year was Tammy Coxen as Administrator (as she is again this year), with myself and Ian Moore as her deputies and Colette Fozard and Marguerite Smith (the WSFS DH and DDH) also on the subcommittee. My own CoNZealand records are no longer accessible, and anyway I would feel bound by confidentiality not to reveal much about what we said internally, but I felt and feel that it was the right decision. The Book of Thoth is about magic, but treats it as a real phenomenon rather than a literary device, which is the wrong side of the line for me. Really the crucial choice was whether to proceed with the category at all, given the low number of ballots, but we determined that we should go ahead.

Amusing quote from The Book of Thoth, out of context:

It is now proper to consider the peculiar numbering of the Trumps.

The only other disqualification in Best Related Work that I am aware of was another date misalignment in 2012, when The Anticipation Novelists of 1950s French Science Fiction: Stepchildren of Voltaire, by Bradford Lyau, actually topped the nominations ballot, but had been published in 2010.

In the current Octothorpe episode, Liz Batty then asks if there are any cases of Best Related Work nominees being “booted” because they fitted better in another category. It’s not quite the same thing, but in 2019, we shifted a significant number of nominating votes for Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine, from Best Related Work to the once-off Best Art Book category which we ran that year. We failed to make that public at the time, which is an oversight, and I report it now for historical transparency. (I was the Hugo Administrator that year, with Sanna Lopperi-Vihinen as my deputy, and the subcommittee also included Vince Docherty and Mark Meenan, WSFS DH and DDH.)

I don’t seem to have kept a record of how many votes were moved from Best Related Work to Best Art Book, but my memory is that it was a bit less than half of the total, easily enough to make the difference for it qualifying for the Best Art Book category, and we felt this respected the rule that a finalist that is eligible for any other category should not be eligible for Best Related Work. Also there were fewer votes for Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth in Best Related Work than in Best Art Book.

In other years where I have been involved, we have shifted a handful of votes between Best Related Work and other categories where appropriate, but that was the only case where it made a difference.

On other marginal calls: I went on the record in 2019 saying that I would probably have disqualified Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin, an anthology which was the runner-up for Best Related Work at nominations stage, for the same reason as the 2002 team disqualified Writers of the Future vol 17. An aggrieved GRRM fan later asked me what category it would have been eligible in, then? I replied that actually not everything has to have a Hugo Award category.

I’ve also said on the record that if I had been the administrator in the relevant years, I would probably have disqualified a music album which was on the Best Related Work ballot in 2012 (again, not everything gets a Hugo category), and a fiction anthology which was allowed onto the ballot in 2004. 

One factor that would weigh with me, however, is the popularity of the nominee among voters. As I said, The Book of Thoth would have only just scraped onto the Retro Hugo ballot in 2020 if we had let that stand, and the same is true of the Writers of the Future anthology which was fifth out of five in 2002. On the other hand, in some of the more controversial eligibility calls that I have been involved with, I felt that a strong groundswell of fannish opinion in favour of recognising a particular work should be acknowledged – most notably with Archive of Our Own, the 2019 winner, and Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Award speech, the 2020 winner. Having said that, I also felt that these both solidly fell within the rules.

I am not really in favour of any rule change here. The only one worth discussing is to change the category to only include works of critique / commentary about the genre; but that would have excluded several worthy recent winners. And I’m not in favour of creating seprate awards for Commentary / Critique and Everything Else, because I think that there are already more than enough Hugo categories, and we should be pruning before we add more.