Hope for a brighter future permeates the 2024 Hugo Awards at Glasgow Worldcon

Earlier this month, the Hugo Awards took place at the 82nd annual Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland. The Hugos are one of the most prestigious award ceremonies for genre fiction, meant to honor the best and brightest working in fantasy and science fiction and its fandom. If you're into speculative fiction, it's a pretty safe bet to say that you probably want to keep an eye on the works, writers and artists who are nominated for and win Hugos each year.

In past years, the Hugos have been plagued by multiple controversies, such as the preemptive censorship of several entrants during last year's ceremony in Chengdu, China, which resulted in the censure and resignation of several World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) members who played a prominent part in facilitating the awards. Even this year, there was an attempt to stuff the ballots, which resulted in the disqualification of 377 fraudulent votes after the Glasgow team promptly caught it.

"[L]ike any prominent award, there have been controversies literally from the beginning, when Forest J. Ackerman refused the very first Hugo Award ever presented and left it on the stage," author John Scalzi explained during an introductory speech which ran through the history of the awards in under five minutes. Scalzi spoke about the controversies — they are too ingrained a part of the awards' history not to — but he also touched on why the Hugos have endured as the most renowned award in the sci-fi and fantasy field in spite of them.

"We celebrate the Hugos and those who win and are finalists for them but even more, when there are stumbles and controversies, we work to correct them. The Hugos are pre-eminent not because everybody says they are, but because as a community we care about them, and care that they truly represent us."

- John Scalzi

The Hugo Awards are an entirely community-voted award, chosen by those who support and attend Worldcon. First and foremost, that community nature sets it apart from many other similar awards. That has at times contributed to some of those controversies Scalzi mentioned, since the Hugo Awards are perhaps more accessible to attempts at tampering than an award decided solely by jury might be. However, it also provides more opportunities for transparency. When the Hugo Awards system works, it works very well.

I had the opportunity to attend the Hugo Awards this year, and am so glad to say that in many ways, it feels like they are back. There was a feeling of optimism, with many of the award speeches centering not just hope for the future of the craft, but calls for a brighter future at large. Several winners used their time on the stage not just to thank those who supported them in the creative journeys, but also to call attention to pressing social issues, charging the science fiction and fantasy community to support those who need it most.

Hugo Award-winners call for aid to embattled communities

Xiran Jay Zhao, author of Iron Widow, was one of the writers censored out of the Hugo Awards in Chengdu last year, where they were up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. As the name suggests, the Astounding Award (formerly the John W. Campbell Award) is given out to a writer whose first published work displayed extraordinary promise. It's one of two awards given each year at Worldcon which aren't technically Hugos, but which hold more or less the same weight.

Typically, authors are only elligible for the Astounding Award twice: the voting year that their first work was published, and the year after. However, Zhao's eligibility was extended because of last year's censorship debacle. And at Glasgow, Zhao took home the Astounding Award.

"Thank you all, I know that you all voted for me only because you felt bad for me," Zhao joked as they took the stage. "They say that the Hugo Awards has weathered many storms, and I am one such storm. So yes, I was one of those people who got disqualified for no reason last year, and I just would like to thank Dell Magazines for extending my eligibility because last year was the last year that I was eligible for this award. So this is an opportunity that I didn't think I would get to have, and I am just so overwhelmed right now because lately I have not been given many reasons to have hope, but just the community...the outpouring of support is so touching to me."

Zhao used the rest of their time on the stage to call attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine. "[W]hile I have this platform, I would like to bring attention to the conditions in the Gaza Strip right now. Right now I am in communication with about eight families in the Gaza Strip, and right now conditions...the average temperature is like 34 degrees [93.2 degrees Fahrenheit], and they are living in tents. And many of their children are breaking out in hives because they have no air conditioning, no running water, and it's just terrible."

Zhao directed the audience to their social media, where they have a link tree set up to support those families in Gaza as well as other refugees who've already fled across the border to Egypt and are still in need of aid.

Strange Horizons, a long-running science fiction, fantasy, and poetry magazine, took home a long overdue win for Best Semiprozine after being nominated 11 times in past years, and they similarly called attention to their "colleagues and friends in Palestine."

"Strange Horizons supports the Palestinian peoples' right to justice, freedom, equality, and self-determination. At this time, we'd advocate reading and centering the Palestinian people, their writing and reporting, and what they are asking of us as a global community."

- Strange Horizons Hugo acceptance speech

Speaking just before that, Adri Joy of the blog Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together used their time on stage to bring attention to several other real-world issues. Nerds of a Feather won their second Hugo this year, for Best Fanzine, and Joy didn't waste the opportunity to speak directly and firmly about the race riots which erupted across the UK earlier this month.

"While I'm here, I want to use this platform to note that we're gathered here at a time of particular national shame for the UK," Joy said. "Decades of xenophobic, racist, and anti-Muslim rhetoric in this country has in the past couple of weeks spilled over into far-right violence and pogroms against refugees and migrants, especially in England and Northern Ireland, and this has been fueled by misinformation and hate-speech from the political elites in this country. I believe that everything we do as creatives and fans of SFF is political, no matter where we are in the world, and I'm very proud to be part of SFF fan communities that stand opposed to that kind of hatred, and which seek to promote diversity and redress historic imbalances in our field, however small and imperfect our efforts may be. I take this award as a challenge to recommit to my own actions, to push back against racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and marginalization in all its forms, in whatever small ways I can make a difference, and I invite all of you all to do the same."

Joy closed out her portion of the speech by calling attention to the sexual abuse allegations against Neil Gaiman. Yes, that Neil Gaiman. In case you didn't know, over the course of the past two months, at least five women have come forward with horrifying stories about their experiences with the fantasy author. If this is the first you're hearing about it, you can learn more about in this solid breakdown of the initial reports, as well as this excellent follow-up article by Maureen Ryan, a veteran entertainment journalist whose 2023 book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood stands as one of the best current studies of the toxic power dynamics in many professional entertainment spaces.

The one thing all of these moments have in common is calling attention to real-world issues, with speakers encouraging the sci-fi and fantasy community to give them as much focus as they do the fictional works they so love. Speculative fiction is often at its best when mirroring the realities of our own world, and the number of winners who used their precious acceptance speech time to shine a light not on themselves, but on dire issues in the real world and our place in it, is notable this year. They were pleas for a better present, which spoke to the hope for a better future.

Perhaps in no acceptance speech was that more clear than in Emily Tesh's, who won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for her science fiction book Some Desperate Glory. Tesh's speech closed out the night, and after some initial joking about pranking the audience with Bilbo's birthday speech from The Fellowship of the Rings and vanishing, she buckled down and went straight for the heartstrings. I've transposed a good deal of what Tesh had to say about Some Desperate Glory below, so that perhaps you might be as moved reading her words as I was hearing them:

"Here is my hope for this book... I hope this book disappears. I hope it joins the honorable, very honorable ranks of past Hugo winners, which spoke to a particular community at a particular time and not to all of history. And I hope for that disappearance because no one sets out to write a science fiction dystopia wanting to be proved right. And Some Desperate Glory is a book which was inspired by some of the worst of what is happening in the world today.

It is comforting, especially if you are a bookish sort of person, which I think many of us are, to believe that books can change the world. I have to say that with the possible exception of Karl Marx, I think very few writers of books can really claim to have shaped history. What a book can sometimes do is change the heart, sometimes as a comfort and sometimes as a spur. And comforts and spurs alike move people, and what actually changes the world is people. And I can imagine few places, few communities, more full of vision and energy and hope for the world than this community here in Glasgow tonight.

I wrote Some Desperate Glory imagining, if you like, a "bad end." I am so pleased that games are now a permanent category. I love a video game, I love a bad end. I imagined the worst possible outcome of what humanity could become, some of the worst of our species: cruelty, brutality, hatred of outsiders and love of power. Tonight, I'd like you all to join me in imagining instead the best, which is something science fiction can do and has always done. And through and because of that power of imagination, I ask you to act in whatever way you can and whatever way is right for you to support the victims of violence and warfare around the world, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan and in many other places. To support the victims of cruelty and intolerance close to home, including here in the islands where that solidarity is dearly needed right now, especially for the victims of the recent racist riots, and for those targeted by the transphobia of some parts of the UK media.

I wrote humanity's bad end, and I call upon you all with perfect faith to prove me wrong. Thank you."

It was a great year for film and video games at the Hugo Awards

The powerful messages and calls for real-world change weren't the only notable things about the 2024 Hugo Awards. It was also a pretty great year for Worldcon and the Hugo Awards in the film and video game space. The Last of Us' standout episode "Long, Long Time," a standalone story about gay post-apocalyptic partners Bill and Frank, took home the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. For Long Form, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves won over tough contenders like Barbie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. This was an especially sweet win and bit of recognition for the movie, which received a warm reception from critics and audiences but failed to break the box office. In November 2023, star Chris Pine told Games Radar+ that he'd heard "rumors" the film could still get a sequel, and felt "pretty confident that it may happen." Surely, winning a Hugo Award can only improve its chances.

As Emily Tesh mentioned in her award speech, Best Video Game or Interactive Work was enshrined into the Hugo Awards as a permanent category this year. Previously, a Best Video Game award was given out at 2021 Worldcon in Washington D.C., but that was only a temporary category — each Worldcon is granted one optional category they can invoke at their specific convention if they so choose, and the 2021 Worldcon was the first to use it for video games. Now, the new, permanent category of Best Video Game or Interactive Work will recognize not just video games, but also tabletop RPGs and other modes of interactive storytelling.

This year, Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 won the honor of Best Video Game or Interactive Work. While there were other strong options in the category, there was something especially fitting about Baldur's Gate winning because of how much it focuses on storytelling. Its presence at the con went well beyond the Hugos themselves; Karlach voice actor Samantha Béart appeared on several panels, as well as MC'ing a performance by the Irish Video Game Orchestra. Larian Studios head Swen Vincke and many of the game's writers were also present. There was a feeling that Baldur's Gate 3 was as integral a part of the convention as any of the usual book-oriented programming, which I think speaks well of the prospects of the con broadening to be more inclusive to writers who work on video games.

Vincke and the writers filed on stage when Baldur's Gate 3 won the first-ever Hugo Award for Best Video Game or Interactive Work. Their excitement was palpable. "The Hugo nominees and awards have determined my reading list since forever. So it's a huge honor to be standing here. All of us were hoping to be standing here, but we didn't dare dream," Vincke said.

"I'm very grateful that you created this award and this category. Video game writing is often underestimated. It is very, very, very hard work. For Baldur's Gate 3, we had to create over 174 hours of cinematics just to be able to respect the choices of the players and to make sure that each and every single one of them would have an emotional story that was reflecting their choices and their agency. And so it takes a very long time. It takes a very large team...it's incredible and it takes a lot of perseverance and a lot of talent. So I'm very happy for all [of our writers] and all of the team back home that we can get this, and very grateful to the fandom and to Worldcon."

- Swen Vincke, Larian Studios

The anal teeth of the Sea Cucumber

I've spent a lot of time talking about all the powerful, meaningful, or notable aspects of this year's Hugo Awards, and there were many. But there was a fair bit of levity as well. Some of that came from unexpected places. Despite how good the ceremony itself was, it was also plagued by technical issues. It featured pre-recorded readings of the nominee names, and they occasionally played when they weren't supposed to; other bits of pre-recorded messaging never played at all.

That was awkward, but it also made for a few memorable moments, like when the British artist Chris Baker, known by the pseudonym Fangorn, was stranded on stage. "I'm not a public speaker, I just stay at home and draw," Fangorn joked when he first took the stage. Later, he was left adrift at the podium after the pre-recorded video from the following presenter failed to play. "I have no idea what's going on. I knew this would happen," he said, getting a laugh from the audience. This resulted in a rare moment of the curtain coming down between attendees and the event-runners, when Glasgow Worldcon staff member Meghan Lancaster ran on stage and valiantly stumbled through presenting the next few categories to encouragement from the crowd.

Other fun moments came from entirely expected places. Ursula Vernon, who writes under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher, won the Hugo for Best Novella for her book Thornhedge. This isn't Kingfisher's first Hugo; she's won five of them, and been nominated three other times as well. She's gained a reputation for hilarious speeches at the Hugos, often focused on strange and delightfully weird facts about obscure wildlife.

This year, Kingfisher spoke about "the noble sea cucumber," and its evolutionary plight which resulted in the creation of anal teeth to help defend itself from parasitic fish swimming up its butt and eating its innards. Yes, you read that right. Kingfisher's speech on the struggle of the sea cucumber was exactly as hilarious as you'd expect, and provided one last jolt of fun into the evening before Emily Tesh closed out the event with her moving Best Novel speech.

All told, the Hugo Awards at Glasgow felt like a return to form after some rockier times in recent years. They had a wonderful focus on elevating deserving voices in fantasy and science fiction while honoring what came before, and many calls for clearer eyes for the future. But more than that, the awards put their actions in line with these sentiments. Glasgow Worldcon used the slogan "A Worldcon for our Futures." And this at this year's Hugo Awards, it lived up to those words.

Full list of award winners at the 2024 Hugo Awards

Astounding Award for Best New Writer
Xiran Jay Zhao (eligibility extended at request of Dell Magazines)

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey)

Best Fan Artist
Laya Rose

Best Fan Writer
Paul Weimer

Best Fancast
Octothorpe, by John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty

Best Fanzine
Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, editors Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano, Paul Weimer; senior editors Joe Sherry, Adri Joy, G. Brown, Vance
Kotrla.

Best Semiprozine
Strange Horizons, by the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective

Best Professional Artist
Rovina Cai

Best Editor Long Form
Ruoxi Chen

Best Editor Short Form
Neil Clarke

Best Game or Interactive Work
Baldur’s Gate 3, produced by Larian Studios

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time”, written by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, directed by Peter Hoar (Naughty Dog / Sony Pictures)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, screenplay by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Michael Gilio, directed by John Francis Daley
and Jonathan Goldstein (Paramount Pictures)

Best Related Work
A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press; Particular Books)

Best Graphic Story or Comic
Saga, Vol. 11 written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)

Best Series
Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)

Best Short Story
“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, May 2023)

Best Novelette
“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023)

Best Novella
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (Tor, Titan UK)

Best Novel
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)

You can find the full long list data for this year's Hugos, which includes all voting data and nominees, here.

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