This year’s Hugo ceremony was held last weekend, a couple of hours after I returned home from a thirty-hour journey by land and sea from Ireland, so for the first time in many years I did not watch it live. I did groggily come to, just as the Best Novel announcement was being made at the end of the ceremony, and checking the winners I see that I voted for three of the twenty-one, which is about my average.
The biggest surprise – and a very pleasant one – was Emily Tesh and Rebecca Fraimow winning Best Fancast, by a single vote as it turns out. I was also frankly glad that voters decided to turn the page on Chengdu, and gave the Best Related Work award to an academic critique of the genre (for the first time since 2018) and Best Fan Writer to Abigail Nussbaum.
Having missed the ceremony meant that I missed the grotesque mishandling of the names of finalists and winners perpetrated by the hosts, Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford, including simply omitting to read out the name of one of the finalists. (It is worth noting that K. Tempest Bradford was one of those who rightly expressed rage at George R.R. Martin’s mangling of finalist names at the infamous 2020 Hugo ceremony. Nisi Shawl has apologised to one of the finalists. Nothing so far from Bradford or from the convention itself.)
I’m familiar with the glitches that can happen in Hugo ceremonies. In 2019, the auto-captioning did such a bad job of transcribing Ada Palmer’s impassioned presentation of what turned out to be the last Campbell Award that it had to be turned off for the rest of the ceremony. In Glasgow last year, a video presentation of one category simply didn’t work, and more seriously, the Chinese text on the finalist slides was transformed to gobbledygook at a late stage in the process and nobody caught it on time. These things can happen, unfortunately.
And bigger mistakes have been made. The 2020 Hugo disaster has already been mentioned. I was in the room for the dreadful 2012 BSFA ceremony. And there is also the classic example of something that may have seemed like a good idea when the organisers had had a few drinks after a planning meeting, but went down like a lead balloon in practice, the hoax awards announcement at the 2016 Angouleme comics festival. However that also means that lessons have been learned, or should have been.
The 2025 Hugo ceremony has been described in detail by several people who were there, including Cora Buhlert who was a finalist and was participating virtually, and Grigory Lukin who was not a finalist but was physically in the room. I won’t go into the gory details, but I do see a lot of people jumping up and down in various channels proposing solutions to make this sort of mistake less likely in future.
Folks, this is a solved problem.
When compiling the ballot announcement this year and last year, we in the then Hugo team made sure to get and use the correct pronunciations of finalist names and titles and we used them in the final ballot announcement. Last year, when there were a lot of Chinese finalists, I did the ballot announcement along with Sophia Xue, a Chinese writer and fan; this year I did it with Cassidy who was then the WSFS division head.
In 2024 we then used those recordings on the night of the ceremony too, precisely to avoid the risks of asking presenters to work their way through the list. Where I knew there was a potential problem, I made sure that the card with the winner’s name included pronunciation instructions, and if possible I took the presenter through the pronunciation in advance.
I can’t claim sole or even much credit for this. The template for getting the Hugo ceremony right was set by Mary Robinette Kowal when she took over as chair of Discon 3 in 2021. There is absolutely no reason that that could not have been done this year as well. When I resigned as Hugo Administrator in May, I passed along all the information about pronunciations in good order. But it seemed that the singing of a song at the 2025 ceremony had been rehearsed more than the presentations, despite the obvious fact that the presentations are what the ceremony is actually about.
Responsibility for this mistake lies with the convention leadership and the hosts, and not with the WSFS / Hugo team. Cassidy and I, along with Esther MacCallum-Stewart, resigned from the Hugo team in May; I simply got tired of fighting all the time. All sympathy and strength to the remaining team members, who kept plugging away, but I am absolutely certain that their efforts to make things go better were stymied.
I’m not planning to be involved with the Hugos again for the next few years, but I wish the best of luck to those who are, especially when it comes to seeing your team’s hard work celebrated at the ceremony. No innovative solutions are needed; just common sense, and putting in the work in advance. As Flanders and Swann sang, if you practice beforehand, it ruins the fun; but the Hugo ceremony can be a career-changing moment for the winners, and that needs to be treated seriously by the organisers. And this year, they didn’t do that.