Vorkosigan Saga wins 2017 Hugo for Best Series

I am extremely pleased to report that the Vorkosigan Saga has won the Hugo Award for Best Series at the 2017 WorldCon in Helsinki, Finland.

Live streaming of the ceremony unfortunately ran afoul of technical difficulties, but I'd been following print links this afternoon as they updated. Generally, if one wins people hurry to say congrats, so you find out pretty quickly; if you lose, it's crickets chirping. So the first I actually heard were two e-mails from friends that said congrats (yay!) but not what for. (Since "Penric and the Shaman" was also a nominee in the novella category, which went this year to "Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire, not to my surprise, congrats Seanan!)

I'll post a link to the ceremony recording when I find one.

Official link here:

http://www.worldcon.fi/wsfs-hugos/hug...

Tor also posts the full results here:

http://www.tor.com/2017/08/11/2017-hu...

The WorldCon's own website should have some pretty interesting voting statistics up soon, as well, for those who like to sort through the raw data. (Later: you can find them through the Worldcon link, above.)

Anyway, here are my acceptance remarks, which I gave to read to my friend and fellow Minneapolis writer Caroline Stevermer, who kindly and bravely offered to be my acceptor in and at the event. (It felt deeply weird to have to come up with these months beforehand. Hope they worked OK in the actual context.)

"Series have been a part of storytelling since The Odyssey followed The Iliad, engaging creators and delighting audiences for millennia. I have long thought that the series is an art form as distinct from the novel as the novel is from the short story, but no one studies series in the same way as novels, except those who write and read and love them. This may be more feature than bug.

It’s likely that the neglect of series in academic forums is practical: while teachers can just (barely) get classrooms of undergrads to read and compare half-a-dozen novels in a semester, there’s no way they could get them to do the same for half-a-dozen series.

Happily, free-range genre readers suffer under no such restrictions. There are still a lot of practical challenges for comparing series, especially those still under development by living writers. This year’s Hugo series category is a really interesting experiment in that direction, and I am honored that my work was among those put in the barrel for this particular roll downhill.

No writer could create a work extending over thirty years without an equal number of decades of publisher support, and it was my good luck that Baen Books and I stumbled into each other at the dawns of both of our careers. I need, as ever, to thank editors Betsy Mitchell, the late Jim Baen, Toni Weisskopf, and my agent Eleanor Wood for being my early and ongoing supporters on this long road trip.

And thank you all."

Ta, L.