On Sunday 11 August, the prestigious science fiction and fantasy Hugo Awards ceremony took place at WorldCon in Glasgow. It follows in the footsteps of two recent controversies – last year’s ballot censorship, which saw several strong contenders being passed over, and this year’s voter fraud, which resulted in the disqualification of 377 votes – and the subject was front and centre throughout the night.
After a painstakingly slow start, which gave time for several audience members to use the loo and one online viewer to return to Threads, where she had been reading about a publisher sending a sex toy in a promo box, this year’s chair, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, stepped up onto the stage.
“The Hugos,” she said after welcoming the audience, “will weather the storms inside and outside of fandom because of our collective dedication to elevating the best of what our field has to offer to our community, to fandom and to general audiences around the world.”
The “storms” she referred to were discussed in more detail by the next presenter and previous winner, John Scalzi, as he took the stage to provide an overview of the Hugo Awards’ history.
“Like any prominent award,” he reminded the audience, “there have been controversies literally from the beginning when Forrest J. Ackerman refused the very first Hugo Award ever presented and left it on stage.” He went on. The 1970s saw voters select the “No Award” option for best dramatic presentation twice; the 1980s were mired by voting irregularities; the 2010s saw voting blocs; and just last year, there was ballot censorship.
But, Scalzi cautioned, leaning over the pulpit. “We celebrate the Hugos. Those who win, and our finalists, 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.”
What the Hugo Awards stand for continued to be emphasised throughout the night, as winners used their acceptance speeches to discuss the importance of their work. A full list of winners and finalists can be read here.
A spokesperson for Strange Horizons, the winner of the Best Semiprozine category, talked about how they hoped their magazine could provide “the next new voices in genre, a platform for their weird and wonderful stories and art.”
Ruoxi Chen, who won the Best Editor Longform category, discussed how hard and ungratifying working in publishing can be, but that “for every professional punch to the face that you get, there is somebody who is kind, there is somebody who knows your work, there is a book, there is an author.”
However, none emphasised the importance of their art quite as eloquently as Emily Tesh, the author to win the Best Novel award this year for her dystopian novel Some Desperate Glory. “With the possible exception of Karl Marx,” she said, “I think very few writers of books can really claim to have shaped history. But what a book can sometimes do is change the heart. Sometimes as a comfort and sometimes as a spur.”
The Hugo Awards may certainly not be a flawless enterprise. Its voter-based system opens it to all types of vulnerabilities, and there seemed to be no shortage of technical glitches throughout the ceremony, but perhaps that is the cost of democracy. In a world where science fiction continues to be overlooked, the Hugo Awards offers a space where artists on the fringes can be recognised for the work they do. Even if it is sometimes accompanied by controversy.
Words by Elkyn Ernst
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