Usually as soon as the detailed Hugo statistics have been published, I run an analysis looking at the closely results, the lower placings, and the almost-nominated. I have done it again this year – see who won by one vote, who got onto the ballot by one vote, who came sixth despite almost topping the final ballot in their category and who was beaten by No Award – but I also have thoughts about the strengths of the individual categories.

As usual, Best Novel and Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, appear the strongest, with the most nomination votes and the most nominees. The other two categories that look very robust are the two Best Artist categories, which had the lowest number of first preference votes for No Award and both the lowest number and the lowest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.

But other categories seem a bit more vulnerable. If the old 25% rule had still been in force, two categories would have been No Awarded this year – Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine (the latter by a hair’s breadth). Best Editor Long Form also had the lowest number of nominating votes, the lowest number of nominees, the lowest number of final ballot votes and the highest percentage of No Award votes among first preferences. I have long been of the view that it is difficult for Hugo voters to make a fair assessment of the editor’s role in bringing a novel to press.

Best Fanzine has been struggling to attract voters for a while. Fanzines are at the core of the history of science fiction fandom, and it would be a sad day if we had to admit that they are no longer relevant for a critical majority of fans. But sometimes sad days come.

The special Best Poem category performed below my expectations. It had the lowest threshold for getting on the final ballot, and the highest number of No Award first preference votes. I would want to see at least one more trial before I voted to ratify it as a new Hugo category.

More robust than the above, but worth noting that Best Game or Interactive Work had the highest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.

Detailed analysis follows.

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.

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

A reminder that the deadline for Hugo voting is coming up fast. Sending best wishes to this year’s Hugo team, but also personally relieved that I have stepped away from it myself.

I didn’t finish all of these, but I watched enough of them to decide my votes.

Short Form

6) Fallout: “The Beginning” – I watched half of this but really had no idea what was going on. Voters who enjoyed the entire season naturally nominated the season finale, but on its own it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think there is a strong case for diving the Dramatic Presentation categories differently, for Best Episodic Drama and Best One-Shot Drama or something like that, which would better reflect the way we actually consume sf media.

5) Agatha All Along: “Death’s Hand in Mine” – I really enjoyed the series as a whole, which looked gorgeous and is acted with conviction; I just wasn’t sure that the plot of this one made sense.

4) Star Trek: Lower Decks: “Fissure Quest” – and here we have not only the season finale but the second last episode of the season getting on the ballot. I watched the first few seasons of Lower Decks, really enjoyed them, but haven’t seen any of the fifth series apart from the two finalist episodes. Even so, it all makes sense. Bumping this one a little below the other on grounds of plot complexity.

3) Star Trek: Lower Decks: “The New Next Generation” – and it makes a difference in your appreciation of a season (and indeed a series) finale if you are familiar with the characters; I loved the closure but I also loved the humour.

2) Doctor Who: “Bubble and Dot” – tremendous effects, impactful plot, an evil society, apparently Ncuti Gatwa’s first filmed scenes, and he started as well as he continued.

1) Doctor Who: “73 Yards” – in my original ranking of Season One I put this third and “Bubble and Dot” top, but I’ve rewatched this and reassessed it, and now I definitely like it more. Apparently Millie Gibson’s first filmed scenes. Gets my top vote this year.

Long Form

6) The Wild Robot – I hate cute anthropomorphic robots, and the animation is actually rather poor. Didn’t last past the first 20 minutes.

5) I Saw the TV Glow – writing this post, I realised that I couldn’t remember anything about it although I watched it only a couple of weeks ago, which is never a good sign. Checking other sources than my memory, it’s a commentary on cult TV that doesn’t quite hit the mark.

4) Furiosa – looks fantastic, but really, such awful people doing such horrible things to each other; ick.

3) Dune II – sat down to watch this on streaming and it weas fifteen minutes before I realised that I’d actually seen it in the cinema. Looks great and well acted, but a little lacking in soul.

2) Wicked, Part 1 – I did not have time to watch more than just the start of this, and probably won’t have time to before the voting deadline, but it’s clearly the kind of thing that I will enjoy a lot when I see the full thing.

1) Flow – an incredible achievement of animation and mystery. You could watch it over and over. I only watched it once, but it gets my vote.

I may do a note on my Best Series vote if I have time.

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.

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

6) “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine. Second paragraph of third section:

Okay okay okay, let me explain.

I just didn’t get this. I liked all the others.

5) “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim. Second paragraph(s) of third section:

I did understand this, but found it quite difficult to follow.

4) “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones. Second (and final) paragraph of third section:

The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.

A very short, vicious, vivid portrayal of a prison planet.

3) “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third section:

“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”

Short story of a family quest and revenge.

2) “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim. Third paragraph (no internal sections):

So they (the first “they”) killed the kid again. They stormed the hole and broke the kid out and slit the kid’s throat on public television (as all television in Omelas was publicly funded), and they said, “Look at what sort of shit your beautiful city is built on!” and the kid bled out and it was extremely graphic to the point of being censored in later broadcasts. And one of the tracks of the free public transit system twisted loose, and a bunch of commuters were killed in a freak accident, and the stock market started shuddering downward, and a house collapsed on the south side of Omelas.

Update of the classic Ursula Le Guin story for today, including communications technology and general societal decay.

1) “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal. Second paragraph of third section:

Margery resettled the bag on her shoulder and the hammering of her heart got louder and harder against the walls of her ribs. Off to the side of the path, something gleamed in the sunlight. Too much sunlight, as if trees were missing.

Fairy tale involving giant homicidal snails. What’s not to love?

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 felt that two of these were less good than the other four, but otherwise I found it difficult to rank them. However, you gotta start somewhere.

(Titles link to original publications where available.)

6) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha. Second paragraph of third section:

We sat on a bench and watched the East River behind the slow-moving bodies on the walkway. I tried to show her the dead book, and she thumbed the margins before giving up when it wouldn’t brighten. It was clear she had no interest in the thing.

Books and technology and perceptions and truth. Didn’t quite have the emotional punch that I wanted.

5) “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third section:

There was plenty of night left; she knew she too could go back to bed. Instead, she wrapped up in her biggest cloak and stomped outside to empty her mailbox. It was almost—almost funny the way it kept coming, like a magic cauldron in a fairytale following a poorly worded command to make porridge, swamping the town. Finally she hauled the bag back inside and spread it out in front of the fire. Outside, the storm grumbled, receded, returned, filled the entire cottage inside the cave with the echoing sound of rain.

Quite short; wizard and her apprentice awkwardly build a relationship and fight evil.

4) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Second paragraph of third section:

Antonis could not believe it. In fact, he had probably stopped listening to her rant right about when his werewolf neighbor had sent him a new wallpaper pattern. A thank you gift for watering the roses outside the werewolf’s castle. Antonis said that he’d prefer to be paid in teeth, the currency of TinyCastle™, but as he had explained to Nefeli, you have to roll with the game, that’s half the fun.

Splendidly creepy story of the protagonist (and eventually others) becoming gradually cut off from the rest of humanity, in parallel timetracks, with good sense of place.

3) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie. (Title story of a collection which you can get here.) Second paragraph of third section:

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially
for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village.
And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter
Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years
wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark.
That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’
mothers had said. “What if ?” the mothers whispered. A good person,
who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village,
but peculiar. “What if ? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What
if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

This was the first of the novelettes that I read, and I was sure I was going to vote for it, so am slightly surprised to find myself putting it only third. Very well drawn story of a rather merciless alien society, whose first contact with humans brings change, but perhaps not enough.

2) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker. Second paragraph of third section:

“Hot stuff!” Her truck drifted in my car’s direction as she eyeballed it, then overcorrected. “No wonder you had trouble.”

Tremendous tale which starts off looking like it’s just a matter of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters finding some common landing point after decades of estrangement, and then turns into something completely different. Loses a quarter of a point for last four paras, which are an unnecessary epilogue.

1) “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. Second paragraph of third section:

I looked at the lease again and noticed something else: it was the simplest lease I’d signed since that sublet agreement in college that we’d made because everyone’s parents said we needed to “get things in writing.” Leases are usually full of rules and caveats—how to give notice at the end of term, how much you’ll owe if you damage something, whether you’re allowed to have a pet. This lease just said it ran from September through June, how much we were paying per month, and that we’d be paying utilities. The lead-based paint disclosure and the move-in checklist were paperclipped to the back.

Tremendous story of selkies, feminism, toxic relationships and the academic research treadmill. Charming and righteously enraging, with strong sense of the Massachusetts coast. Gets my vote.