2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Dramatic Presentation, Long and Short | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding

I’m not a big podcast listener, and while I knew all of these by repute, I had heard very few episodes of any of them before. So I picked one of the episodes submitted for the Hugo Packet in each case, going for the one where I thought I knew most about the topic. My ranking was pretty clear, and for once I’m going to start with the positive.

1) Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, presented by Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow. A favourite author talks about a favourite author – superb combination. I listened to all three of the submitted episodes here, on Eight Days of Luke, Wilkins’ Tooth/The Ogre Downstairs and Dogsbody. It must be decades since I read any of these, but I loved them as a young reader and loved returning vicariously to them now. Particularly interested in considering Eight Days of Luke as a gateway book to the rest of DWJ’s œuvre. Though am not totally convinced that Thor and Astrid get it on by the river. Gets my enthusiastic first preference.

2) Hugos There, presented by Seth Heasley; I listened to the episode where he and Damo Mac Choiligh talk about the early novels of Iain (M.) Banks with great knowledge and affection. A good moderator sits back and guides the discussion, and this was a good demonstration of that skill. As with all of these, I don’t know if I was just lucky or if the podcast is always like this, but I enjoyed it.

3) A Meal of Thorns, presented by Jake Casella Brookins; I listened to the episode where the guest is Dan Hartland talking about China Miéville’s The Scar. I must have read this shortly before I started bookblogging in November 2003, because it came out earlier that year, and I have vivid memories of the mosquito people. The episode is a well-structured deep dive into a long novel from more than twenty years ago, and it made me think that I should reread the book.

4) Hugo, Girl!, presented by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson; I listened to the episode with Redfern Jon Barrett talking about The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Another favourite book of mine (one of my top five recommendations), and good discussion, but I am at the stage of life when I find too many voices with similar accents a bit confusing on my ears.

5) The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe; I listened to the episode interviewing Julie Philips about her imminent (no published, I think) book on Ursula K. Le Guin. The book sounds great, but the podcast is very slow paced, to the point that I found myself frequently checking to make sure that my player had not dropped.

6) Worldbuilding for Masochists, presented by Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Natania Barron; I listened to the episode interviewing John Wiswell, whose recent Hugo-nominated fiction I have enjoyed, but I found the multi-presenter format confusing and diluting of the points that were being made (if they were being made). So it dropped to the end of my list.

No doubt I could have found better episodes of those that I marked down, but life is short.