Some Comments on the 2025 Hugo Winners – with Bonus Tall Ship Photos

The winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards were announced last night or rather very early in the morning at Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. My thoughts on the finalists may be found here and the full voting statistics and some comments by the administrator may be found here.

I didn’t attend Worldcon this year, because the US government has unfortunately gone quite mad and the risk of being refused entry to the US or – worse – getting thrown into some ICE jail is too big, especially since Worldcon already falls into the gray area between business and leisure travel for me.

However, Worldcon wasn’t the only big event happening this weekend. Cause the SAIL tall ship festival in Bremerhaven, one of the biggest in the world, was also happening at almost the same time as Worldcon. And unlike Seattle, Bremerhaven is only about eighty kilometers away. And when the water was sunny but cool on Saturday morning, I hopped into the car and drove to Bremerhaven to the visit the SAIL. I will probably do a separate blogpost with more photos, but for now enjoy this little taste:

A look across the new harbour in Bremerhaven. Moored on the right, you can see the “Shabab Oman II” from Oman and next to it the “Sagres II” from Portugal

A SAIL panorama: The bow of the “Le Francais” from France, local hero “Alexander von Humboldt II” with her distinctive green hull and sails, the “Capitan Miranda” from Uruguay, the historic Simon Loschen lighthouse and the stern of the “Gorch Fock”, training vessel of the German Navy

Scandal prone, but iconic: The “Gorch Fock”, training vessel of the German Navy. She was also the lead vessel in the SAIL tall ship parade together with the “Alexander von Humboldt II” and also transported German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to open the festival.

The Spanish Galeon “Andalucia” was one of three Spanish galeons at the 2025 Sail in Bremerhaven.

Running around Bremerhaven all day – plus having to take the longer way home with a pit stop in the Fright Zone Brake, all because of a traffic jam on the Autobahn – did make me tired to the point that I just wanted to take a nap when I got home. But then I realised during the drive home, “Crap, the Hugos are tonight, aren’t they?”

I did take the nap after all – since the Hugo ceremony wasn’t due to start until the unchristly hour of 5:30 AM my time. I also put a bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail in the fridge, just in case.

A bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail, just in case. I even bought the fancier name brand rather than the cheaper store brand.

But enough about my day. Let’s get to the 2025 Hugo Awards:

The Ceremony

First a few words about the ceremony. Now I’m something of a Hugo ceremony veteran by now and I have never experienced one which did not have its share of problems from fire alarms to messed up auto-captioning to lengthy delays to mispronounced names and rambling speeches by presenters and winners. Some years stand out for being particularly issue laden – shout out to the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell of 2020 – but they all have some issues.

So how does the 2025 Hugo ceremony measure up? Well, it wasn’t as bad as the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell – thank heavens – since it was a lot shorter for starters. However, it definitely wasn’t good.

The issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were many and – what was really annoying – they mirrored issues we’ve seen in previous years, so lessons apparently weren’t learned. To begin with, the ceremony started with some delay, which is annoying, when it’s already a late start – the ceremony was supposed to start at 8:30 PM Seattle time, which was very late in the evening for people on the US East coast and the early hours of Saturday morning for those of us in Europe.

When the ceremony finally did start, it started with several people walking on stage, singing a rewritten version of the “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” from Agatha All Along, entitled “Down the Hugo Road”.  The people singing were the two hosts, K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, as well as several Hugo finalists, which I only knew because having the request to sing on stage sprung upon them upset several finalists. If you didn’t have any behind the scenes knowledge and were just watching the ceremoney livestream, you had no idea who any of these people were, because they were never introduced.

The “Down the Hugo Road” song was a cute idea, though I don’t think they really needed to sing every single verse – the song is over three minutes long in Agatha All Along version – nor did the hosts have to reprise the chorus every time someone came on stage or a category was announced. Cause the Hugo road song wore out its welcome very quickly. I think it was around the Best Fan Writer was announced that I said “If I have to hear that bloody song one more time, I’m going to scream.” By the time Best Related Work was announced, I actually did scream. And when I took my trash out very early on a misty Sunday morning, I probably woke the neighbours by singing very loudly “Fuck, fuck, fuck you off, fuck you all off” to the tune of the Ballad of the Witches/Hugo Road”. Because the Witches/Hugo Road song had replaced the earworm (this rewritten version of Adele’s “Rolling on the Deep” as performed by Michelle Brückner to promote the SAIL tall ship festival) I’d had in my head for days, because Radio Bremen 1 insisted on playing it multiple times per day. It’s not an improvement.

Agatha All Along was a Hugo finalist in the Best Dramatic Presentation Short category, so it was probably reasonable to assume that many/most people in the audience would be familiar with it. That said, not everybody watched Agatha All Along. For example, Lodestar finalist Jordan Ifueko reported in the Hugo finalist Discord that her grandmother had asked her what hymn they were singing between the category announcements. Also, if you have seen Agatha All Along, you know what the “Ballad of the Witches Road” is actually for, which makes it just a baffling all around choice.

But that annoying song was just one of the many issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony. Early on, the hosts made a joke about not having a script, while messing about with a pile of papers. Unfortunately, as the evening wore on, it became clear that it wasn’t a joke, but that there apparently really was no script nor any kind of plan at all.

The two hosts often seemed lost. At one point, one of them joked that they shouldn’t have taken a gummy (of the marihuana kind) beforehand and unfortunately, I’m not sure if that was a joke either.

Names were mispronounced all the time, including mine, since no one had apparently bothered to give the hosts a phonetic pronunciation guide, even though the Seattle Worldcon had the information. With some of the big team categories, some names were not read out, while others were, and this was not previously agreed with the respective teams who were often sitting in the audience to hear themselves referred to as “Team X”. A page from the speech submitted by the designer of the Lodestar Award was missing, which the hosts only realised on stage. Apparently, no one had informed the hosts either that the Best Dramatic Presentation finalists would be introduced by clips from the respective works (including one which literally spoiled a series finale). And finally, the hosts forgot to read out the name of the Lodestar finalist So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole, who was sitting in the audience and deeply and understandably upset. Hearing your name read out at the Hugo ceremony is a special moment and finalists being randomly denied that special moment is just wrong. What made these lapses even worse is that all of this has happened before, including a finalist being skipped (this happened with one of the Best Graphic Story finalists in Dublin).

The autocaptioning course struck again as well, with the autocaptioning system not only seriously lagging, but also messing up names, titles and anything that was not English. I didn’t notice any howlers like in Dublin, where the audience was pretty much rolling on the floor laughing at the autocaptioning system utterly butchering Ada Palmer’s heartfelt Campbell/Astounding Award laudatio, but it was still terrible. And again it has happened before. Note that the WSFS Business Meeting uses a human transcriber for the captions and no autocaption system. What made the whole thing even worse was that a deaf finalist who was in the audience that he couldn’t properly read the autocaptions or make out the sign language interpreter.

There were plenty of other issues with the organisation of the ceremony as well. When Joy Alyssa Day, designer of the beautiful Hugo base, asked for the lights to be dimmed, so she could demonstrate its light-up action feature (this must be the first ever Hugo base with an action feature), the lights did not dim. The sound was often terrible as well to the point that I couldn’t make out one of the winners – Best Dramatic Presentation Long – at all and neither could the autocaptioning robot. I have worked live events and I have a lot of respect for light and sound technicians who are truly the unsung heroes who keep such events going.  However, while I respect light and sound technicians, I also expect them to do their jobs.

Another issue were the seating and stage arrangements. Cause some of the finalists/winners were seated quite far away from the stage and the stage was accessed via a ramp, so it took a long time for the winners to make their way on stage.

Now don’t get me wrong, the ramp is a huge step forward (pun fully intended) for accessibility, especially since there was at least one wheelchair user among the finalists this year. And even for non-wheelchair users the often steps leading onto a stage can be a problem to navigate. The steps leading onto the stage in Dublin were so steep that I thought, “My Mom [who already had mobility issues at the time] would have a hard time getting up here.” And while my Mom wouldn’t have to get on stage, there are many people with mobility issues, including Hugo finalists. What is more, Hugo winners are almost always nervous, they’re frequently wearing outfits with long skirts, full skirts, hoop skirts, bustles, trains, high-heeled shoes and other potential hazards for tripping or getting stuck. So in short, the ramp itself was a great idea and I hope to see ramps on other Hugo stages.

But because the ramp was long, it took winners quite a bit of time to make their way on stage. Now the Oscars, which have a similar arrangement, cover the time it takes to get on stage with music and an announcer reading out some facts about the winner. “X has been nominated five times, this is their first win”, etc… The 2025 Hugo ceremony had music on occasion, which you often couldn’t really hear on the livestream, because the sound was so bad. And while there apparently was some kind of “voice of God” announcer, they only did their job sporadically.

So in short, the 2025 Hugo ceremony was a mess and it didn’t really have to be, since most of the problems were issues other cons had encountered before. A lot of people are disappointed with the hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, especially since both of them have done so much for more diversity in our community, so people expected better from them. But while K. Tempest Bradford, Nisi Shawl and the other presenters bear part of the blame, the main issue lies with the organisation team behind the scenes. Seanan McGuire has said that she was supposed to announce the Best Novella winner, but then was asked to announced Best Novelette instead during the ceremony with barely any preparation time. Seanan managed to handle this, because she is good at improvisation. Not everybody is.

But enough of the mess that was the 2025 Hugo ceremony. Let’s get to the winners:

Best Novel 

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel is The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.

I have to admit that this win surprised me a little, if only because The Tainted Cup seemed to get less buzz than many of the other finalists and also because Robert Jackson Bennett really stepped in it during the voting period by defending the use of AI to vet program participants by the Seattle Worldcon. And while I did enjoy The Tainted Cup, there were other finalists in this category I enjoyed more. But if you look at the voting statistics, The Tainted Cup had a comfortable lead from the start, so other voters seem to have liked it a lot more than I did.

Robert Jackson Bennett submitted a funny pre-recorded acceptance speech, since he wasn’t on site. And in fact, none of the Best Novel finalists were on site this year, which is a first as far as I know.

Best Novella

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novella goes to The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Once again, this wasn’t my first or even second choice for this category, but then the category was very strong and it’s a fine winner.

Also that fact that both Best Novel and Best Novella went to male writers will hopefully pacify the “But what about the poor widdle menz?” brigade?

Best Novelette

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novelette is “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer. This is a great story and was also on the top of my ballot.

Best Short Story

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo.

This wasn’t my top choice in this category, but it was one of the most pleasant surprises on this ballot. I never loved Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle as much as many others evidently do, so I didn’t expect much from this story, but I wound up enjoying it a lot and I think it’s a most worthy winner.

Best Series

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Series is Between Earth and Sky by Rebecca Roanhorse.

This win surprised a little, but it was a very pleasant surprise, since I have been enjoying the series. A look at the voting data reveals that Between Earth and Sky was in fourth place in the first round, behind InCryptid, Southern Reach and Stormlight Archive, but a lot of people placed fairly high after their first choice, whereas not all that many people like Southern Reach, Stormlight Archive and InCryptid equally.

Best Poem

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Poem is “A War of Words” by Marie Brennan.

Best Poem was a special category run by the Seattle Worldcon, though there is a proposal to make it a permanent category which I would welcome, because poetry has been part of our genre since the very beginning and deserves recognition.

The category was presented by Brandon O’Brien, who was the Seattle Worldcon’s poet laureate and who did a great job presenting this special Hugo – in verse form.

Best Graphic Story

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Short Story goes to Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way written by Ryan North with art by Chris Fenoglio.

This story, which is basically a Choose Your Own Adventure comic in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, was another very pleasant surprise, since it wasn’t really on my radar at all before.

Writer Ryan North also accepted the award in person, but then the comic people usually do care about the Hugos.

Best Related Work

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Related Work is Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll.

This was also on the top of my ballot and it’s one win which makes me very happy, because I have a strong preference for well-researched non-fiction books in the Best Related Work category, which unfortunately has become something of a catch-all category for anything that’s cool but doesn’t fit anywhere else in recent years.

That said, the one edge case finalist this year, the r/Fantasy bingo team, did win me over by simply being really great and enthusiastic people. I wouldn’t have minded at all, if they had won.

A look at the voting data shows that the documentary about the failure of the Disney World Galactic Star Cruiser Hotel was actually in the lead, though it eventually finished in third place. I have to admit that the popularity of Jenny Nicholson’s documentaries in general and this one in particular surprises me, because they never really worked for me.

This one also irked me, because when I was in primary school I was told I shouldn’t talk about Disney World (which had visited with my parents long before there was a Disneyland Paris and this was extremely uncommon for Germans) so much, because this was apparently bragging. Not that I was bragging, I simply had experienced something awesome (and I will forever be grateful to my parents for giving me that experience, even though Disney World was expensive even back then and also probably not something my parents enjoyed all that much, since they didn’t like amusement parks) and wanted to tell everybody about it. My teachers were probably also not happy that I completely failed to be impressed by our local amusement parks Magic Park Verden and Heide-Park Soltau, neither of which even remotely compares to Disney World, especially not in the 1980s. However, I stopped talking about Disney World and then about my experiences abroad – I had lived in the US and Singapore by that time – altogether, because it was very clear to me that talking about my experiences was not welcome*. This lasted well into adulthood to the point that when I started applying for jobs and sending out resumes, someone asked me why I didn’t put my experiences living abroad in my CV (international experience was something employers were looking for at the time) and I said, “Well, it’s not really important and who cares about that anyway?”

So considering I was told I shouldn’t talk about Disney World so much as a kid, of course I was a little irked about a three hour documentary about a single attraction in Disney World. Though part of me would love to sit my primary school teachers (who are very likely dead by now) down in front of the computer, “So you think I was talking too much about Disney World, huh? Well, how about this video where a woman spends three whole hours talking about a single attraction in Disney World, while wearing funny hats, then?”

Best Dramatic Presentation Long 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long goes to Dune Part II. Honestly, Dune must be the most awarded SFF work of all time now, since it was nominated as a serialised novel, regular novel, 1984 film adaptation, 2000 TV-series, 2003 sequel TV-series, 2021 movie, 2024 movie as well as for a tie-in comic and it won several of those Hugos.

Not that Dune isn’t an important work, but it’s not that good that it deserves so many wins and nominations in different categories. But then I’ve been over Dune, since I tried to watch the 2000 TV-series and didn’t like it and then pulled the novel of the shelf and realised that I no longer liked it either.

There was no accepter present for Dune Part II nor was there a pre-recorded speech or even an acknowledgement from anybody involved with the movie – and Denis Villeneuve’s name was really badly butchered, too. The person who accepted the award, a Worldcon volunteer, held an impromptu speech blasting studios for not sending anybody to accept their Hugos in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Short goes to the Star Trek: Lower Decks series finale “The New Next Generation”, which is the first time a Star Trek episode has won a Hugo since the Next Generation series finale back in 1995, i.e. thirty years ago.

In stark contrast to the Best Dramatic Presentation Long winner, writer Mike McMahan did accept his award virtually and held a lovely speech. On BlueSky, Mike McMahan also explains what being nominated for and winning a Hugo means to him, since he’s a longtime SFF fan and has been following the Hugos for years.

Best Game or Interactive Work

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work is Caves of Qud. Now I’m not a gamer and I can’t really say much about this game except that it looks nice enough visually.

What is more, at least one of the developers was present to accept the Hugo. In general, the finalists in the game category have always been happy about their nomination, showed up to accept their awards and interacted with fellow finalists, which makes me happy, even though I particularly care for this category.

Best Editor Long 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Editor Long goes to Diana M. Pho, who held a great acceptance speech about the importance of art and resistance.

Best Editor Short

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Editor Short is Neil Clarke. It’s a highly deserved win and Neil also held a great acceptance speech, speaking out against generative AI.

Best Professional Artist 

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist goes to Alyssa Winans. All artists nominated in this category are great, but this is one win I was really happy about, since Alyssa were both first time finalists in the same year and met when we were both on a panel together.

Best Semiprozine

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine is Uncanny Magazine. Uncanny has won almost every year save for two since 2016, but then they do excellent work.

The acceptance speech was given by co-editor Lynne M. Thomas, who is also having a very difficult time right now.

On BlueSky, Lynne M. Thomas notes that this is her twelfth Hugo win, making her the woman with the highest number of Hugo wins and the person with the fifth highest number of Hugo wins overall, tied with Mike Glyer.

Best Fan Writer

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer goes to Abigail Nussbaum. It’s a well deserved win and coincidentally also the first repeat win in this category since David Langford’s nineteen year winning streak ended in 2007.

Best Fan Artist

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist is Sara Felix, who gave a very heartfelt speech about community and the extremely difficult year she had. For more about that, see here and here.

This is a category full of great artists – all of the categories are full of great people – but I’m very happy for Sara, especially considered all that she and her family went through this year.

Best Fancast

The 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fancast goes to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, another first time finalist, on what would have been Diana Wynne Jones 91st birthday.

I have to admit that this win surprised me a little, because of all the podcasts nominated in this category, this was the one that I was least familiar with. That said, it’s a very deserving winner.

If you look at the voting statistics, this was also the narrowest win of the night, since Eighty Days of Diana Wynne Jones beat Worldbuilding for Masochists by one vote.

Best Fanzine

The winner of the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine is Black Nerd Problems. They’re a first time finalist and most deserving winner. Unfortunately, they neither sent an accepter nor an acceptance speech, which is extremely uncommon in the fan categories.

This also meant that the bottle of premixed Hugo cocktail could stay in the fridge for now, since Galactic Journey, for which I was nominated as part of the team, did not win. My surname also acquired an additional J, when it was read out, but that’s okay. I used to teach German as Foreign Language and respond to pretty much anything that even vaguely sounds like my name. Also considering how badly some names were butchered, I got off lightly.

Lodestar Award for Best YA or Middle Grade Novel

The 2025 Lodestar Award for Best YA or Middle Grade Novel goes to Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger. This is a highly deserved win and Darcie Little Badger also delivered a great speech about how the inspiration for Sheine Lende was her own family history and how her ancestors survived in the face of persecution.

This year’s Lodestar trophy, a little robot, is also very cute.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer

The winner of the 2025 Astounding Award is Moniquill Blackgoose.

This is one win I’m not one hundred percent happy with. Not because Moniquill Blackgoose isn’t a talented writer, she is, but because according to my definition (which is not the Astounding Award definition) she’s not a new writer, since she’s been writing erotic fiction under another name for several years before To Shape a Dragon’s Breath came out.

While I know that it’s common to thank your agent in your acceptance speech, if your agent was banned from Worldcon, most likely due to an ongoing feud with an SFF author and Worldcon member, it does leave an odd aftertaste.

That said, together with Rebecca Roanhorse’s win in Best Series and the Lodestar win for Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger, this has been a great year for indigenous SFF and that’s something worth celebrating.

Finally, was that jab against John W. Campbell by the presenters really necessary, considering that name of the former Campbell Award was changed five years ago? Just let it go.

Though I also noticed that David D. Levine, who presented one of the categories was introduced by the “voice of God” announcer as a Campbell Award finalist among other things. Of course, the not-a-Hugo for the Best New Writer was named the Campbell Award back when David D. Levine was a finalist in 2003 and 2004, but lots of people refer to the award either by the current name even for winners and finalists from before 2020 or as the former Campbell Award

***

So that’s it for the 2025 Hugo Awards. All in all, we have a very good set of winners, which is why it’s a pity that the conversation about the pretty terrible ceremony has drowned out celebrating the actual winners.

As for reactions and commentary on the Hugo winners, there’s not a whole lot yet. The leading nuissance voice feels the need to tell the world in his Fandom Pulse Substack newsletter how irrelevant Worldcon and the Hugos are and how the Hugos reward “extreme identity politics” – in a year where both Best Novel and Best Novella went to white men. The Fandom Pulse article is behind a paywall, but he makes the same points on YouTube. Basically, he objects to The Tainted Cup winning Best Novel, because it’s fantasy (the first time a fantasy story won a Hugo was in 1959) and because the protagonist is a bisexual woman. He also objects to Black Nerd Problems and Speculative Whiteness winning Hugos, because one is a fanzine by black fans and the other is a non-fiction book about the far right trying to claim the genre for themselves. Or maybe he’s just jealous that he isn’t mentioned in the book.

Finally, he also has a problem with the Best Graphic Story winner, because he dislikes one of publisher IDW‘s editors Heather Antos, who supposedly campaigns for awards. Of course the fact that Star Trek: Lower Decks is a popular series, which also won in Best Dramatic Presentation, clearly has nothing to do with a Lower Decks comic winning Best Graphic Story. No, it has to be the doing of an editor who for all I know might not even have worked on the book. Also, there were panels on neurodiversity, panels that were criticial of generative AI, people said critical things about Donald Trump and a fabulous looking drag queen read stories to kids. In short, it’s the usual nonsense.

More Hugo reactions and commentary will be linked here, as they surface.

ETA 08-18-2025: Alan Boyle, who has been reporting about the Seattle Worldcon for GeekWire, talks about the 2025 Hugo winners at Cosmic Log.