Hugo Nominees Announced

The list is here.

My thoughts:

Short fiction is particularly interesting. Seanan McGuire has been nominated for "Tangles," with the publisher listed as Magicthegathering.com...tie-ins pretty much never get nominated. Even when they're written by a McGuire.

And a person named Blue Neustifter has been nominated for "Unknown Number," with the publisher listed as...Twitter.

Twitter fiction getting nominated is probably a good thing for the field in general. Variety is fun. But I didn't exactly expect it.

Ellen Datlow's absence from Best Editor, Short Form is conspicuous. I wonder if people got tired of her winning every year or if she finally did the right thing and recused herself. (Don't get me wrong, Datlow is a fine editor, but there comes a point when it's professional to say that you have won enough).

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is just leaping into the field. He has nominations in two categories...but those categories are Best Novelette and Best Editor, Short Form. How many people have been nominated in an editing category and a writing category in the same year? Not many! And when it's somebody who's new on the scene too...this is very much a watch this space. "O2 Arena," while not hugely to my personal taste, is brilliantly written.

As every year, a rant got nominated for Best Related Work. It's a rant I mostly agree with, I'm just tired of ranty blog posts being nominated. Although at least the trend of nominating entire online conventions lasted precisely one year. Nothing against the people who got nominated, it was just quite time consuming to fairly judge them. However, I'm slightly disappointed that it's only books this year, I enjoy when something weird or fun shows up.

I don't really have any other thoughts, working on my full analysis which I'm going to post on Medium later.

(And expect my final analysis on the Nebs by the voting deadline too).