The Hugo Awards are the annual reader-nominated and awarded selections for the best in the previous year’s SF and F. It’s intended to award science fiction works, but fantasy schlops over frequently, and we’re all OK with that. Works include videos and movies, novels, short stories and art.

The way it works is that anyone can vote. Basically, if you are upset that your fave wasn’t nominated or didn’t win, you need to make sure that you partake in the process. It is accessible, and it is meaningful. You must buy a voter membership to the current year’s WorldCon. This year it cost $50. I feel that the charge is both necessary and appropriate for a couple of reasons. First, it puts your money where your mouth is, and second, it costs money to organize such a massive annual event.

It turns out to be such a prestigious thing that even to be nominated is to effectively win an award.

I watched the live feed last night. Duncan voted in the Hugos, I didn’t. Neither of us were part of the nominations.

The most significant thing I learned is that the numbers involved in the awarding are pretty small. The awarded pieces won by handfuls of votes. My vote next year will make a difference. It seems as though people kind of pass over the nomination stage and really get down to work at the voting stage. And finally, there is so much recognition after the awarding that people really only start to explore the nominees and awardees after the ceremony is said and done. Absolutely it is a popularity contest, with all of a popularity contest’s pros and cons. The most aggressive downside of award by popularity is that the more complex, literate, lengthy works have a smaller readership.  The best pro is that it *is* a fan-given-award–thus it is meaningful to folks like me–and the guidelines for nomination and winning ensure that it remains a fan award.

It was cool of RenoVation to live feed the ceremony. I expected it to be an Academy Awards style event with all that pomp, but people were dressed in costumes and t-shirts, and the Ken Scholes’ & Jay Lake “comedy” team kept the tone friendly and approachable. I appreciate that. I felt that I was allowed to be part of this in fandom. I expected to watch the event and feel like an outsider, outclassed and out-moneyed (like the Academy awards), but the whole ceremony was very down to earth.

The Hugo Ceremony, being a part of WorldCon, is an international event. That was evident in that there were folks from Australia, Britain and France on stage, as well as a video from Japan concerning the earthquake there in March and their carrying on with their SciFi conventions.

The ceremony opened with a thanks to the folks who run the damn thing. That was really cool. It’s such a huge undertaking. You can get an inkling of this just from the list of people involved.

I loved the bit at the beginning about the artwork that went into the designing of the base for the rocket that is the trophy. Marina Gelineau designed and made the bases for the trophies, and her introduction to the work was really neat. She does stained glass, especially the fine painting on the glass. For the trophy base, she made each one a unique representation of the microfauna possible in extreme environments.

The next interesting bit was the reception by Chris Garcia of his Hugo for the Best Fanzine Award for The Drink Tank. You have to watch the video to see what I mean.

Girl Genius won the graphic novel award. Kaja Foglio, in a gracious move that will immortalize her I’m sure, bowed GG out of further consideration for Hugo nomination in order to allow other great and awesome works to take the spotlight. Now that’s class.

Of course, Dr. Who won the short form dramatic work. Additionally, they were nominated for three of the five spots. It might be time to break this award down into “lots of funding and decades of fan followers” vs “The New Guys with a home video camera”.  The other two works were utterly different from Dr. Who and from eachother. You can read more about them here.

Lou Anders finally won his well-deserved Hugo. Plus I liked his outfit. Again, its interesting that the nominees for this category were in the same category. Anders is the publisher and editor and art director at PYR books. He does all those things for that small press. In large publishing houses, the editor is the editor. There is another department for marketing, for cover art, etc.

Overall, I learned a lot about the categories other than Novel and about the process. XKCD was nominated, but kind of passed over because it was nominated under the artist’s name rather than the name of the comic strip. Best related work has a lot of potential as a category. Is Dragon Age II eligible, I wonder?

What will happen next year? Well, first of all, I am going to be part of the nominations process. We’re going to see a lot of exciting stuff come out of the Hugo process next year. As FantasyLiterature.com says, it’s been a big year for fantasy. I would like to see the wider scope of really fantastic works better represented in the novels category. I would have liked to have seen Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings nominated for the 2011 awards, for example. BullSpec and The Quantum Thief both need to be on that ballot, for starters. Who’s in this with me?