The Hugos are hugely important for me personally. I have been aware of them since I was a teenager, back in the 1980s. I have been following them closely since the start of this century. I went to my first Worldcon in 2005, in Glasgow, where David Langford won his eighteenth award for Best Fan Writer (of twenty-one in total), and his zine Ansible won its sixth (and most recent) Hugo. I have been involved with administering the awards, off and on, since 2017. SF and fantasy fans have organised many other awards, and I wish them all strength and success. But the Hugos are the oldest, and the biggest.
Over the last ten years or so, the Hugos have changed—for the better. In 2010, all of the fiction categories were won by white men. 864 votes were cast for the Hugo nominations that year, and 1094 for the final ballot. Both were the highest numbers ever up to that point. But participation really took off from then on. Nomination votes climbed steadily—1,006 in 2011; 1,101 in 2012; and over 1,200 for every year since then. Even more so for final ballot votes, which have had more than 1,800 participants in every year but one since 2011. The Hugo Awards Voter Packet (more on that later) has certainly helped as well.
The result of broadening participation has been broader diversity, which in turn gives the awards more credibility. It also unfortunately spurred a counter-attack in 2015 and 2016 by the so-called Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, who felt that the awards were now going to the Wrong People and attempted to push the clock back. The impact on the Hugos was serious, but in the end survivable, and incidentally provoked the highest number of votes cast ever as fans reacted against the attempt to hijack the awards for dubious (and poorly articulated) politics.
One other consequence of this change of mentality was the renaming of the John W. Campbell Award, also administered by the Hugo team, to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, after an impassioned speech by Jeannette Ng at the ceremony in 2019, in which she called out the classic editor’s racism. The award and its name are sponsored by Dell Magazines, who saw the need to shift away from honouring Campbell. Jeannette Ng’s speech then itself won a Hugo in 2020, to the dismay of some, though personally I was delighted.
The body of law and lore around the Hugos has gradually accumulated since they were first presented, as a one-off, in Philadelphia in 1953. Originally it was entirely a matter for each Worldcon to decide how many Hugos to award, and in what categories. These days, we are tied by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Constitution, which can only be amended by a vote in two successive years of the business meeting at each Worldcon.
Worldcons do have the option to present a special category Hugo, and we’ve done that a few times on my watch. Seattle Worldcon 2025 is giving a Hugo for Best Poem, in fact. But that’s the only degree of flexibility that we have within the rules, at least concerning which categories of rockets we give out.
Myself, I’m hesitant to add further to the number of Hugo categories. Counting the Lodestar and Astounding Awards, we already have twenty, compared to thirteen in 2000 (and seven back in 1953). I’m not sure that quantity is the same as quality, and I was personally relieved when a proposal to add two more was killed at the 2024 business meeting, after nobody could be found to speak in favour of ratification.
Another choice made by Worldcons, at least as the rules currently stand, is whether or not to run Retro Hugo Awards for the “missing years” since the first Worldcon in 1939, filling the gaps when Hugos were not awarded. I used to really like this idea, but I went off it after running the Retro Hugos in 2019 and 2020 when it became clear that winners and finalists did not really reflect the spirit of Worldcon as it has become, that voters were voting on the future reputations of the nominees rather than their work in the year in question, that the heirs of the winners were difficult to track down to send the awards to, and that participation was declining. A proposal to abolish the Retro Hugos altogether was passed at the 2024 business meeting in Glasgow, and will go on to Seattle for ratification.
The annual cycle of Hugo administration begins in January. For various very good reasons, which I don’t intend to go into here, the registration software often tends to get largely or completely rewritten for each convention. WSFS’s aim under my watch has generally been to get the Hugo software talking to the registration system and up and running at an early stage in January for nominations, and then again in April for the final ballot. This does not always work. 2020 was the worst case in point, but it’s a bit of a bare-knuckle ride every time.
The most labour-intensive moment for the Hugo team is counting the nomination votes and releasing the final ballot in late March or early April. It’s not generally realised that the biggest hassle here is to tally (or “canonicalise,” as we say) the different spellings of nominated works so that all votes for the same thing are counted appropriately. This has to be done by the human eye; I can’t tell you how many different ways the title and authors of This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, were written in 2020. And, folks, if you think you are being helpful by inputting “Lord of the Rings, The” and “Hobbit, The,” you’re really not.
Assessing eligibility is usually much simpler, though there can still be problems. In my first year, I had to disqualify two finalists after the final ballot had been announced, when it turned out as we put the packet together that their work was not sufficient to qualify them in the category. I don’t want to do that again. Ever since, I’ve generally had a team of researchers checking out the top nominations as they come in and alerting us to any issues.
I’ve had a few interesting eligibility calls to make. The case that sticks in my mind was 2021, when for the category of Best Related Work we agreed that two convention fringe events and a video blog about a TV show were all eligible in the category, though the precedents were slender. We also allowed a new translation of a poem that had been first published in 1786, first published in English translation in 1837, and first published in the USA in 1882 (and this actually won the award). To our surprise, public fury was directed not at any of these but at a completely different finalist in the category, purely because we did not censor an obscenity in its title. I still think we got it right.
The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book was deliberately created by WSFS with no restriction of what could be nominated, other than the guidance given by the title of the award. Some people think that we should disqualify any book not specifically labelled “YA” by publishers. I prefer to let our voters decide what goes on our ballot, rather than marketing departments. All of the winners have been stories about teenagers engaging in problems related to and relatable to the lives of teenagers, as well as an SFnal setting; and they have all been good books.
A number of Hugo nominees were disqualified by Chengdu Worldcon in 2023, without clear reasons being given, and the published vote counts from the nomination stage do not make sense. I have no idea what happened, beyond the (frankly confusing) public statements. In 2024, we disqualified three potential finalists for technical reasons within the rules, one of which qualified in a different category. We also disqualified 377 votes on the final ballot, which had clearly been bought in order to get a Hugo for one particular finalist (who I believe was completely unaware and uninvolved). These decisions are tough, but important for the awards’ credibility.
One other area of controversy—particularly in 2021, when it led to the resignations of two different Hugo teams—is the number of names that should be allowed to appear on the ballot for each finalist. It’s nice when large teams make it to the ballot, but this does have an impact on resources for a volunteer-run convention. I’m also not convinced that voters are really impressed by very long lists of names. I accept that people have the right to self-describe as they wish, within reason, but sometimes less is more.
To come back to the Hugo packet—finalists are invited to make their work available to voters, for the limited time until voting on the final ballot concludes. It makes a WSFS membership of that year’s Worldcon well worth the cost, as the value of the novels and other fiction included in the packet is considerably more than the price of membership. It was first run as a one-off in 1998, but then picked up by John Scalzi as a personal project in 2008 and 2009, and since then has been run by Worldcon Hugo administrators.
This is one area where I sometimes feel that the generosity of the contributors is not always appreciated. Access to the works of finalists in the packet is a privilege, not an entitlement. I wish that publishers would give us files that are easily readable in all formats, and that none of them would try to fob us off with NetGalley (which creates its own set of problems), but we have to accept what we are given.
Finally, designing the trophy is usually the responsibility of the Hugo administrators. We are constitutionally bound to the rocket design, which has remained standardised since 1984. There is a lot of scope for innovation when it comes to the base, however. My own taste is for the simple blocks that we had in 2017 and 2019, my first two years, as anything more complex does risk getting damaged in transit. But an appropriate amount of ornamentation, as we had in 2024, can work very well too.
The Hugos remain connected to seven decades of tradition. I was thrilled to be able to show off the first Hugo ever presented, back in 1953, to the audience at the 2024 ceremony in Glasgow. I was also delighted that Hugo Gernsback’s oldest great-grandson accepted our invitation to be one of the announcers of the final ballot. The prestige of the Hugos is not automatically given; we have to keep working for it. And I am proud to have done some of that work over the last few years.
© 2025 Nicholas Whyte
