ladybusiness | Hugo Ballot Finalist Announcement, or More Ladies and Queers on Your Ballot

We at Lady Business are excited to announce that we have accepted a place on the final ballot for Best Fanzine in the 2016 Hugo Awards.

This is a strange year to be be a Hugo finalist. If you've been following the Hugo Awards, you know that the last couple of years have been controversial. We prefer not to dwell on the controversy here, but if you’re unfamiliar and would like a summary, Fanlore has a good overview. After the 2016 finalists were announced, one of the original five Fanzine finalists, Black Gate, withdrew from consideration. The Hugo administrators contacted us to let us know that we were next in the voting tally, and offered us the open slot. After some conflicted deliberation, we decided that we wanted to acknowledge the people who voted for us in the nomination phase, and we accepted a place on the final list.

First and foremost, we would like to acknowledge Black Gate, a fine blog that has been an integral part of the SF/F fandom community for many years. Withdrawing from consideration cannot have been an easy decision for them, and we wish them all the best.

We also want to thank MidAmeriCon and the World Science Fiction Society for all their work to manage the Hugo Awards, especially in these contentious times. It's a big job, undertaken entirely by volunteers — fans providing a labor of love for the SF/F community — and we are honored to be a part of it.

Last, but absolutely not least, we want to thank everyone who nominated us and all of our friends and readers who support us and appreciate what we do. We couldn't do any of this without you.

For those not familiar with Lady Business, we are a group of women and genderqueer people who write about media from an intersectional feminist perspective. You can learn more about our individual editors here. If you'd like a sampling of our posts in 2015, here is some of what we've done: