Hugo Awards
Started: 2024-08-25 13:13:31
Submitted: 2024-08-25 16:02:21
Visibility: World-readable
Autographs, audio, economics, robots, lunch, wilderness, and Emily Tesh wins the Hugo Award for Some Desperate Glory
The first thing I did when I arrived at the SEC on Sunday morning, the 11th of August of was wait in the queue for hall 4, and when the hall opened, I headed straight for Aliette de Bodard's autographing line, as one of the authors I've enjoyed whom I haven't had the chance to meet (for values of "meet" that include "talk briefly at the front of an autograph line"). She signed the trade paperback copy of In the Vanisher's Palace which I picked up the previous day at Waterstone's in the dealer's hall because Kiesa asked me to look out for it.
This left the rest of the 10:00 slot free so I headed across the concourse and up the stairs to the Meeting Academy set of rooms to catch the end of the panel "The Best of Narrative Audio", which featured five people involved in making their own audio fiction, moderated by Alasdair Stuart, who talked about the . The most memorable line from one of the panelists was, "Here's the thing about thinking 'I can do this' while you're in high school: you can't, but also, you should try." Which reminded me of some of my dubious creative output in high school (the high water mark was a pair of screenplays that I'm happy I wrote but should never again see the light of day), and that I am now a parent to a kid in high school and I might consider what sort of creative activities to encourage or facilitate.
 This Worldcon set up its schedule to start at 10:00 and run with hour-long panels followed by half-hour passing periods, which worked well enough for getting around the convention, but I still felt like I needed to carefully gauge the popularity of a panel (based on the panelists and the subject) versus the size of the meeting room. This led me to head straight to my next panel, "All the World's Books Depend on the Beancounter: Economics in SFF", to make sure I had a seat. (The other minor problem was figuring out how close to sit to people in the audience: if I arrived early, it seemed weird to sit right next to someone in an otherwise-empty row, but if the panel were popular that would mean fragmenting the seating so people coming later would have to awkwardly squeeze past me to sit in the seats I left vacant.)
The panel discussed economic systems in fiction and how they contribute to the worldbuilding and the narrative. No one had an especially fond opinion about libertarianism. There were questions (more questions than answers) about how an economic system would work inside the closed environment of a generation ship. At one point Charlie Stross said, "Everyone in this room is in a post-scarcity society, from the perspective of a medieval peasant." There are people in the US (and in the UK) who do not have their physical needs met, only because we are unwilling to implement the necessary transfer payments to make it happen. But even if we were willing to implement a post-scarcity society, the panelists were concerned that human nature would mean that people will still be upset that they don't have more. This is something I see up close in the Bay Area: I sit somewhere in the mid-90th percentile for household income but it's still easy to look at the people who have more money and resources than I do.
Next I headed to the panel "Robots in Western and Non-Western SF Traditions", mostly because Martha Wells was on the panel. The thesis of the panel was the difference between robots in Japanese postwar manga and in American speculative fiction. In Japan, Astro Boy was used as an explicit civil rights metaphor in a time when Japanese society (encouraged and enforced the postwar American occupation) was unwilling to talk about the racism that contributed to the expansion and aggression that led to the war. One of the panelists was a Japanese academic who came prepared with a presentation of visual aids to illustrate the different manga and other titles he brought up in the panel. In American speculative fiction, robots are used more often to stand in for lower-status people; Asimov's Three Laws explicitly set up robots as an underclass in a way that's uncritically representative of slavery. Even when fiction asks "can robots be people?" it fails to engage with the question of whether people can be people.
By the end of the panel it was 14:00 and I hadn't yet eaten lunch, so I grabbed a sandwich from the coffee shop on the SEC main concourse (which become my standard lunch during the convention). By the time I finished eating and headed to hall 1 for the "Best Cats of SFF" panel it was already full, because everyone else at the con wanted to see John Scalzi and Naomi Kritzer talk about cats. Instead I headed out for a walk along the Clyde, heading across the cable-stayed Bell's Bridge, looking up at the observation tower at the science museum, and returning along the Millennium Bridge.
The last panel I attended was "The Myth of the Wilderness", which was an interesting look at the way that the wild is used in fiction, which draws in large part from American settler colonialism and the Wild West.
After my last panel I got a pita sandwich at a takeaway on Argyle Street, then found a place to sit on the grass in the sunny Sunday afternoon and eat in Kelvingrove Park, in front of a sign that identified the lawn around the fountain as a designated practice area for pipe bands. I returned to my hotel to change into my cosplay to attend the Hugo Awards, comprising of a suit and tie, since I'm going to count this as an opportunity to dress up and wear the Logan tartan tie I found in the back of my closet.
The Hugo Award ceremony was scheduled to begin at 20:00, and it looked like the seating capacity of the main hall of the SEC Armadillo would not be adequate to fit everyone who was attending the convention. (There were additional rooms set up to hold remote viewing, but if I was going to go to the trouble of flying across an ocean to visit Worldcon I wanted to be there, in person, in the room where it happened.) By the time I arrived in front of the Armadillo, more than an hour ahead of the event, there was a scrum of people waiting, which was soon herded into a somewhat-more-orderly line along the side of the building. As I waited I talked to the people in line with me who had also show up to the Hugo Awards by themselves, a young woman from Belgium named Astrid (who was attending her first Worldcon), and an older guy from Norway (who had also attended Worldcon in Helsinki in 2017).
After waiting we were admitted into the Armadillo in stages. We spent what seemed like a long time stopped in a hallway leading to the auditorium. We were eventually seated on the main floor of the auditorium, under the large overhang for the balcony above us, with a clear view of the entire stage. It looked like the front section of the seating on the main floor was designated for award nominees, who continued to fill out the section as we waited for the event.
The ceremony started a few minutes late and then proceeded with minimal interruption. This convention moved just about everything that wasn't directly related to the Hugo Awards (and the other, not-a-Hugo awards that Worldcon gives out) to other events, including the opening and closing ceremonies. John Scalzi gave a brief history of the Hugo Awards ("if I talk fast, it's five minutes," he said), including a clear reference to the shenanigans at last year's award in Chengdu, and this year's attempts to be considerably more transparent and above-board in the administration of the awards.
For the most part the ceremony went smoothly with only a few glitches. The ceremony did not have a master of ceremonies making up the transitions between awards and announcing individual presenters; instead there were a series of people who showed up to announce individual awards. This year the convention had a prerecorded video reading the names of all of the nominees, which looked like it was designed to improve pronunciations of the names of the nominees, though I understand there were still some problems with the names and translations in the recordings.
Half-way through the ceremony there was a video or video link that was supposed to allow the introduction of several awards, but the video wasn't working and the ceremony faltered until one of the presenters realized that they had the script that would have been read, and took to the stage to read that script. But the script didn't include the envelope holding the name of the winner, so they couldn't actually announce the winner. The prepared presentation did include a slide with the name of the winner, after an awkward pause waiting for the off-stage tech people to advance to the right slide. Then the people on stage remembered that the name of the winner was already printed on the award that was being walked out onto stage ready to be presented to the winner, so they could just read that, which turned out to work.
This year I read all of the nominees in the main fiction categories, from short story to novel. (I did not attempt to read all of the series nominees, because I want to do things in my life other than read for the Hugo Awards; instead I voted based on the series that I had already read.) None of my top picks in the shorter fiction categories won, but most of the categories were so close that it was hard to pick a single top choice, and hard even to rank them. I did rank Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh as my number one pick, and I was thrilled when she was announced as the winner.
"No one sets out to write a dystopian novel hoping to be proven right," she said as part of her acceptance speech, and I hope that history does not follow the path towards fascism from her novel.
After the Hugo Awards ceremony I headed to the Crowne Plaza around the corner to hang out for a bit. (I didn't know anyone there and didn't end up talking to anyone, but I quietly appreciated the post-Hugo Award vibe.) I looked at the Hugo administrator's report and stats report, but the formatted-for-print PDF was hard to read on my phone. By the time I left the trains had long since stopped running so I walked the mile-and-a-half back to my hotel to retire for the night, ahead of the last day of Worldcon.
