2017 Hugos: What it means to be out of the woods

I don’t love all the 2017 Hugo Award winners. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve been a geek and a nerd and a lover of all things speculative my entire life, but until 2015, I’d never involved myself much with the Hugos. I knew they were important and prestigious, but I loved novels, not short stories, and in any given year, I was reading or rereading old stuff more than I was trying newly printed works. Why pay for Worldcon membership just to vote for one or two items in one or two categories and leave the rest blank? I didn’t feel like it mattered for me to force my way into the conversation if I didn’t have anything to add.

2015 was a rude awakening. When the Puppies managed to hijack almost every slot in almost every category for the Hugo ballot nominations, I was angry. The Puppies claimed that certain people didn’t belong in this community, and that touched a nerve: this was supposed to be the place where all the bullied and strange and lost are welcome. Where, when you had no place to go, they had to take you in. And through GamerGate and RaceFail and other incidents, the community was just starting to talk through the ways people had been made to feel unwelcome or unsafe, and bringing their actions more into alignment with those ideals. The idea that quality work that was beloved by a majority of fandom was not welcome because it was created by a girl, or a person of color, felt like a sickening step backward. I was angry. I was outraged. I suddenly had a lot of things to add to the conversation.

That first year was mostly about shutting down the Puppies, voting “No Award” over and over again. The second year, voting on the preliminary ballot, was about educating myself, reading more widely in the field, encouraging others to opt in as I had and start actively shaping the community. The finalist ballot was still a bit thin on non-Puppy material, but I read everything and voted my conscience, and was gratified by the victories of 2016.

This year, as I’ve written elsewhere, was huge, literally and figuratively: the first year since the rules change, which meant that there was way more to read in every category, all of it amazing and varied. The experimental “Best Series” category didn’t make the reading list any less daunting, either! There were a few Puppy choices still on the final ballot, but that was to be expected: like it or not, they are members of our community. So I made my way through the massive reading list, voted, then fretted, waiting for news of the results.

The winners’ list, announced on Friday, is pretty stunning: a lot of experimental fiction, a lot of challenging, complex stories that don’t usually get told. And their creators are almost all women or people of color. “Best Series” was a personal favorite of mine, the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, featuring a disabled hero. I’m delighted that Seanan McGuire’s “Every Heart a Doorway,” with its multiple queer and transgender protagonists, won, though if it could have somehow shared the prize with Victor LaValle’s “Ballad of Black Tom,” I would have been elated beyond all description. And for NK Jemisin to win “Best Novel” two years running feels like a nail in the Puppies’ coffin, since she’s been the target of so much vitriol for being a talented and outspoken black woman in the field.

In the end, everything that won a Hugo this year was exceptional work that pushed the boundaries of the genre. The 2017 Hugos don’t perfectly reflect my ballot or my tastes. But they do reflect the general consensus of a community I am proud to be part of.