Voting for this year's Hugo Awards opened this week - for anyone interested, the full list of finalists can be found at:
https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2026-hugo-awards/
Along with the list of nominees, the Hugo Awards Packet was also made available to voting members. It's an impressive 17.7 GB download, a surprisingly large number considering that none of the Long or Short Form Dramatic Presentation nominees have included full copies of their selections, although Frankenstein has been generous enough to include a screener link and password. Sadly, Best Novel nominees Robert Jackson Bennett for A Drop of Corruption, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for Shroud, also chose not to include full copies of their novels, as did Naomi Novik for her Best Novella entry, The Summer War*. However, it's gratifying to see that, in addition to the ePub versions of their work, many of the other nominees have elected to add audio versions as well.
Looking over the nominees, I was a bit surprised by the Long Form selections - or rather, by the options that didn't make the list. The Long Form nominees are:
- Andor (Season 2)
- Frankenstein
- KPop Demon Hunters
- Mickey 17
- Sinners
- Superman
I thought Bugonia might get a nod - and doesn't Weapons have a supernatural element?. None of the Marvel options of Thunderbolts*, Fantastic Four, or Captain America: Brave New World made the cut, and the latest chapter in the Avatar series was also shut out. And, if the door is opened to entire seasons by the inclusion of the second season of Andor, it's surprising that the Season One of Murderbot didn't receive a nomination, given its popularity - especially considering that two Murderbot episodes are nominated in the Short Form category, and a third episode was withdrawn by the showrunners to comply with the episode limit for the category.** Why not just put the whole season in for Long Form? Or Pluribus, which is also structured as a single long narrative but only represented by a single entry in the Short Form list, as is Severance?
In contrast, I'm fine with Doctor Who only having one nominated episode rather than the whole season, given its episodic nature and the varying list of writers, but Pluribus is very much Vince Gilligan's baby and could logically be treated as a single body of work. (Interestingly, Andor is the product of four writers, which would seem to make it a better candidate for single episode consideration.)
All of this fails to answer the question of why the download is so large? As it turns out, the Related Work category, which cover non-fiction work related to the genre, contains an epic 4.66 GB episode from The History of Westeros podcast - slightly ironically, given that unlike the Long Form entries, the episode is also available for free on YouTube.
- Sid
* I appreciate that authors are concerned with uncontrolled distribution of their work, but honestly, that ship has already sailed - if any of these pieces are available in digital form, I guarantee you that they're already being downloaded for free.
** There's also a nominated Murderbot novelette from Martha Wells, which I'm looking forward to reading, regardless of whether it gets my vote.
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