2025 Hugo Awards Finalists

[renay]

The finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards (for work released in 2024) are out!

Best Fan Writer

This is a solid category of people currently writing in niche Worldcon spaces.

• Camestros Felapton
• Abigail Nussbaum
• Roseanna Pendlebury
• Jason Sanford
• Alasdair Stuart
• Örjan Westin

Of course, I must shout and flail over my pal Roseanna making the list and give everyone a thumbs up for recognizing what has been obvious to many of us!!! Good work, team! Roseanna always helps me think of things from different perspectives, which is one of my favorite things about reviews and criticism. I know she's been honored via Nerds of a Feather, but her writing is something special and I can't wait to see what she teaches us in the years to come.

It's also nice to see Abigail Nussbaum here again, while at the same time, her book, Track Changes, is in Best Related Work. I have the book but haven't dived in just yet. It might be my residence at the heart of the evil empire, but art, deep engagement about art, and using art to contextualize our current moment feels more important than ever.

Also, very wonderful to see Alasdair Stuart, who does excellent writing via The Full Lid every week, on this list again. He's been on my ballot every year for a minute. He's been my main source of games/film news on a week-to-week basis and he does lots of community/connection building by boosting others that helps me find cool new projects I would otherwise never know about.

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

Diana and I have been huge grumps at the voters who would simply not stop nominating adult SFF in this category. Perhaps they finally took the gigantic hints we were leaving everywhere in all our opinionated glory. Or maybe not and it's a fluke (stay tuned for my feelings in 2026). But I'm legit excited about the category this year!

• The Feast Makers
• Heavenly Tyrant
• The Maid and the Crocodile
• Moonstorm
• Sheine Lende
• So Let Them Burn

Best Fanzine

• Ancillary Review of Books
• Black Nerd Problems
• The Full Lid
• Galactic Journey
• Journey Planet
• Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog

Three of my nominations made it! This is a good mix of current blogs and fanzines. My main interest in seeing this list was in the number of nominations, which was 243. My dream is to get this to 400. I don't know how I'd make that happen, but I remain deeply concerned about the future of fannish writing in this Age of Video.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form

I've seen one of the finalists! A TRIUMPH.

• Dune: Part Two
• Flow
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Wicked
• The Wild Robot

I recently purchased The Wild Robot and loved it. The rest of the finalists I haven't seen yet, or even heard of. I Saw the TV Glow is completely new to me.

Best Novel

Because I (once again) pay very close attention to multiple genre awards and commentary about genre awards, I made an educated guess about the ballot a few weeks before the finalists came out.

• Someone You Can Build a Nest In
• Alien Clay
• The Mercy of Gods
• A Sorceress Comes to Call
• The Ministry of Time

My guess ended up being pretty accurate. For The Mercy of Gods, I guessed that even if I hadn't heard much from fandom about it, the first new release after The Expanse would carry some momentum for these authors. I'm curious to see how close it is to the top on the long list when stats come out. Someone You Can Build a Nest In was inescapable on Blue Sky last year, so much so I had to mute the title. My entire timeline was promo for the book or threads gassing up the author. And that's fine! I would still like to see other things in the limited amount of scrolling time I allow myself each day. That is the sole reason I guessed it would be here after it hit the Nebula list and I was right. Lesson: be loud about the things you love because people are listening to you.

Here are the official finalists:

• Alien Clay
• The Ministry of Time
• Service Model
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In
• A Sorceress Comes to Call
• The Tainted Cup

The thing I would have never predicted was that an author would accept two Best Novel slots. I find this very unappealing, so much so that it colors how much I want to read any of his books, at all, ever. There's no rule broken, but it feels…greedy isn't the right word, but I don't have a single word that means "thoughtless about how one takes up space in their communities and optics of their engagement".

Otherwise, this list is wholly books I haven't read. The Ministry of Time has been on my TBR since I heard a review of it on a podcast, but that's it. I'll have to see what I can prioritize, since I really want to get to all the Lodestar and Best Novella finalists.

2025 Awards Field

The things with 3+ nominations (so far, it's still early) are Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (4), Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (3), "Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim (3), and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (3).

SFF awards are diverse and overlapping so there are a ton of things with only one nomination. In my extremely messy, nerdy, in-progress tracking spreadsheet, the range of titles is immense. The Hugo Award is our main popular award, along with the Locus, whose lists aren’t out yet. But there are a ton of professionals and fans building cool short lists all over and uncovering hidden gems the popular awards don't have the structure to capture. I try to keep these things in mind these days when thinking about the Hugo Awards.

Extended Grousing (A Hugo Season Special)

The whiteness across various categories is troubling. It plagues so many of the categories I care about. Part of this is that this award is a club effort, and if you don't pay money to be in the club, you can't help build these lists. That's its own problem I don't know how to solve, because I've been told for years there's simply no way to make WSFS Memberships cheaper for young people living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty, not even member sponsorship programs. And this doesn't even get into how unwelcoming portions of SFF fandom can be. I haven't forgotten some of the vile, callous things said about people campaigning for blogs in Best Fanzine by paper/PDF fanzine creators/fans. As if there couldn't be space for both and changing to be more inclusive and welcoming would crack the awards open. Joke's on them! A bunch of weirdos came along a few years later with that explicit goal. So much for the scary blog writers!

As someone who tried very hard to help diversify the Hugo/Worldcon fanbase, the movement to make our spaces more welcoming so everyone besides white folks could also be passionate about the future of the Hugo Award was…not successful long term. Now in a lot of categories there's backsliding into old behaviors. There are a lot of issues playing into this, including but not limited to what happened around the Chengdu Worldcon and the ethical wound that caused to the legitimacy of the award process; the racism from western fandom groups toward the Chengdu bid itself (y'all realize young fans of color can see y'all, right? Blog/Facebook comments are not an invisibility cloak!); traditional publishing still being majority white; con spaces/practices and how they handled the pandemic and rise of calls for more accessibility; and the loss of Twitter as a discovery and conversation tool.

It turns out we don't need a bunch of white supremacists to homogenize our finalist lists with brute force slates. Leave the (likely) majority white folks to their own devices over time, let them fall back into their traditional reading habits, and they'll pull back to their comfort zones. You'd think folks of the global majority hadn't written any award-worthy adult SFF last year, which I know is untrue. Look at the diversity difference between Best Novel and the Lodestar, or Best Novel and Novella. It's very stark, which in 2025 and *GESTURES TO ONGOING SEGREGATIONIST NIGHTMARE* feels particularly dire. The long list is going to tell a very interesting story in August.

Anyway, this has been a fun reminder to myself to keep an eye on my reading habits!

Last Tidbits

One other cool thing I caught after the awards were announced was that the artist that designed the base for LonCon, Joy Alyssa Day, will be returning to create the base for 2025. LonCon's base was very pretty! I snooped around her Etsy and she has a lot of cool pieces. Excited to see what she'll do for this year.

The whole finalist list is is available of the Seattle Worldcon's website. If you'd like to vote in the Hugo Awards, you can get a WSFS membership. Most years, there's a packet of samples from many finalists, depending on what volunteers are able to source from creators. The convention will be held from August 13 - 17, 2025.

Comments

[novin_ha]

Ha, in my queer & horror-adjacent movie fan circles, I Saw the TV Glow was huge. So big I feel horribly FOMO for it not getting a proper release in Poland.

I like this year's overall finalists. I agree that accepting two best novel slots seems to be... not very strategic or sporting? But my track record with Tchaikovsky is 50-50, some of them are great and some very okay-but-instantly-forgotten (he writes so much).

Of the novels, I've read Service Model (which was not anywhere near Tchaikovsky's best), The Tainted Cup (amazingly fun, and the sequel is great, too) and the Kingfisher novel (10/10, loved it, one of her best imo). I'd like to read The Ministry of Time, but the book has been consistently expensive. I don't think I'll manage to make my way through the remaining novel nominees this year, as I didn't like the Wiswell shorts I've read all that much, and getting a whole novel's worth of it seems like too much. Maybe I'd give a chance to Alien Clay if it was borrowable (I loved Tchaikovsky's spider books) but I'd rather try to get around to the new VanderMeer or Tasha Suri (which are waiting on my shelf).

I loved the only Lodestar I've read, Sheine Lende. And a lot of the novella/novelette/short finalists sound cool. I've read the Mohamed (great), Samatar (amazing) and Kingfisher (one of my least fave of hers). I've read the previous Nghi Vos and loved them all. Tusks of Extinction sounds fascinating. De Bodard I've mostly bounced off of (with some exceptions) so not a priority.

I'm curious which Lodestars will be your favourite.

[renay]

I'm wondering now if maybe I have heard about I Saw the TV Glow last year, but didn't know what was being referenced, on TikTok. I'll know for sure; my partner and I are going to tackle all of the long form finalists for movie nights.

I have never read Tchaikovsky, but I do have Alien Clay from the library so will probably try to get through that before I hit up the short fiction categories. I'm not sure about Service Model, because it seemed darker than I preferred when it came out. I guess it will depend on when/if we get a voter packet with samples of various works. I know not all publishers share full books/series, but even excerpts might help me know if I want to read the whole thing.

There's more than six titles in the Lodestar category for me if I want to read everything. The Feast Makers is a third book, Heavenly Tyrant is a second book, and The Maid and the Crocodile seems like a standalone but might be better read after the duology it's a companion to. So I have some tough choices to make. :D

[novin_ha]

Tbh as I remember it, I didn't find Service Model dark at all. It's just that the satire was not as funny or biting as I could have wanted it to, and it seemed like a novella plot/story expanded into novel length. Alien Clay sounds darker. But then, I've not quite vibed with most robot stories of recent years (I'm hit and miss even on what's arguably the best of them, Murderbot - enjoyed some parts but not a huge fan), and Service Model I enjoyed as a literary exercise in pastiche / intertextuality, but didn't really feel much about.

I've read a few books of his and I loved Children of Time and enjoyed the sequels in particular. Sentient spider civilization? Yes, please.

I didn't realize so mnay of the nominees were sequels. Interesting but also makes it less likely for me to check them out (I read little YA/MG anyway these days.)

[radiantfracture]

I've been told for years there's simply no way to make WSFS Memberships cheaper for young people living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty, not even member sponsorship programs.

This is the organizers saying this? That seems deeply uncool.

[yhlee]

...I mean, large components of Worldcon organization was notoriously...A Lot of Something even before Chengdu Worldcon. It was just, perhaps, slightly better masked.

[radiantfracture]

Right! I'm so out of all the loops that these things surprise me.

[renay]

Because the Worldcon organizers change year to year, it's a lot of people saying similar things about convention costs and what lowering the WSFS membership would do to the ability of the con to function, etc. But at Kansas City a Worldcon volunteer I asked about it basically laughed at me and said the cost would never be lowered, because that's the only thing keeping out "troublemakers". I have largely stopped bringing it up. 😭

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for trying!

Did/do they have a rationale about disallowing the sponsored membership thing?

[renay]

I suspect it's just a workload thing. They don't have the volunteers to scale that kind of project. I wish their software made it easier to buy memberships and transfer them to other emails inside the system, but last time I did it I had to email a team special and it was a whole mess.

[bethynyc]

I'm looking forward to seeing the long list after the awards. I think that will be very interesting!

[renay]

Yeah, it's still one of my favorite parts! I do so much TBR adding from both lists.