Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novel

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the seventh and final part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

Here we're dealing with the big kahuna of the awards: Best Novel.  Best Novel gets all the headlines and gets the most votes every year mainly because these are the big novels that Hugo readers will likely have read even prior to nominations, and especially afterwards.  This is where the average SciFi & Fantasy fan is likely to encounter the Hugo Awards (if they ever do), as getting a Hugo Award is something that has for many a book been featured on second printing book covers.  Winning the other categories gets you press in specialized media - winning Best Novel gets press from regular media.  So you really hope that there are some deserving candidates year after year.  

And well, that's the case this year...mostly.  This year's ballot consists of six novels that are very different, from a few new authors and a few well established Hugo-favorite authors, plus one author who has managed to hit the public consciousness.  That said, two of these books I actually didn't like and will rank below no award, while one of these books was easily my favorite book last year.  So there's a wide scope in my assessment of quality as well.....

Anyhow after the jump are my rankings of this year's ballot.  

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Series

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the sixth part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

This time around I'm looking at the nominees for Best Series, a relatively new award which was seemingly meant to reward series whose value became clear over a series of installments, whose individual novels might not be award worthy but who as a whole were something truly special. Basically it was meant to remedy the fact that there were a few classic series in genre that never managed to get a big award - especially longer series, and the thought was that a Best Series award could remedy that. 

The award hasn't really worked out that way, with four of the five Best Series winners being series that have earned Hugo Awards or Nominations for individual works within those series (The Expanse is the only one whose individual novels have never won an award).  The series has also featured a bit more trilogies than longer series as nominees, which has kind of seemed to defeat the purpose of the award for me.  I've also not loved the combination of works that aren't really a series but are simply within the same setting that have been made eligible for the award, honestly, but I'm clearly in the minority there.  

This time around though, we have a really good ballot of six series, of which a few seem to be the type of work that Best Series is really meant for.  Well to a certain extent anyway.  As I've read at least two novels/novellas in each of these series, I'm pretty comfortable ranking all six series works, which I will do after the jump:

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Astounding Award for Best New Writer

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the fifth part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post, we're going to take a step away from the traditional categories and move to one of the "Not-A-Hugo" awards, the awards that aren't officially Hugos but are voted on alongside them and might as well be.  I'm talking this time about the Astounding Award, which celebrates the best new writers in SciFi & Fantasy, those who have published their first genre works in the last two years (and thus can have two years of eligibility).  

This year we have two repeat nominees from last year, one other second-year eligible writer, and then three writers who are in their first year of eligibility.  And I really loved five of these six writers, so it's another great ballot, and if you haven't tried any of these authors before, I highly highly recommend them.  

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novella

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the fourth part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post we're dealing with the nominees for Best Novella, which includes works of between 17,500 and 40,000 words.  In essence, these are stories that are longer than most people will usually read in one sitting (although I still do so usually) but are shorter than that of a full length novel.  This format has had a resurgence in the last 5-7 years in genre publishing, led by Tor's Tordotcom imprint, which used to publish such novellas exclusively.  

And yes, this year we do indeed get another Tordotcom sweep of the novella category, for the second year in a row, after it seemed we were seeing some other publishers breakthrough for once in 2020.  That said, the publisher sweep does not mean we don't have a diverse group of nominees, with the stories including one fairy tale subversion, one tale of romantic, parental, and colonial abuse, one SF/Fantasy mix-up, one ecological dystopian sci-fi novella, one extremely optimistic character driven story, and one coming of age finding yourself in a portal fantasy world story - six very different stories centering very different but all valid perspectives.  On the other hand, all six of these nominees are well known authors in the field with at least five of them having prior Hugo Noms and possibly wins.  So I guess it's a mixed bag in that way.  

I've reviewed all six of these works in individual posts, so I'll link them next to my rankings below, but yeah all six of these were scored by me between 8 out of 10 and 9.5 out of 10, so this is another hard ballot to rank.  

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novelette

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the third part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

This time around we're going to look at the nominees for Best Novelette.  Novelette is the term for stories between 7500 and 17500 words in length - basically still what most people think of as "short stories", but the longer ones that have more time to develop characters and plots...sometimes Novelettes can be long enough to even be sold as novellas when they're really short, although that's fairly rare.  This time around, we don't quite have any of those long novellas, but still have six stories that take the format in very different directions - several fun and breezy stories, one angry ecological dystopian story, one take on Greek myth (subverted into a take on the Male gaze), one tale about surviving abuse, and one story of art and of being an outsider everywhere over years and finding oneself.  It's another very good crop with a number of candidates I'd be happy to win the award, so ranking these will be difficult.  

But I have to do it, so my rankings are after the jump.

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Short Story

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the second part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

Today I'm going over the nominees for Best Short Story, which covers works of fewer than 7500 words long.  This year, as is frequent, the nominees are all available for free online, so I'll try to link them below as I discuss them.  It's a really strong ballot, which makes this one incredibly hard to order, especially as we have a mix of types of stories - one enjoyable tie-in story (to Magic the Gathering), one creepy horror story, a couple of bittersweet stories, and well, others that aren't so easily categorizable: we even have one story that was actually a twitter thread at first.  

But after the jump I'll try.  

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy Novel

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the first part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE. 

To start this series, we're looking at the Lodestar Award, which is "technically" not a Hugo Award, but is awarded with them anyway, so it counts for this series.  The Lodestar Award is for the best Young Adult SciFi and Fantasy novels of the previous year - the Hugo equivalent of the Norton Award (which is the Nebula version of the same award).  As a huge fan of YA works, I love going through the nominees of this award every year, and unsurprisingly I had read all of the nominees of this one prior to the shortlist being announced.  None of the nominees were on y nomination ballot....and yet there's a number of works here on this list that I really liked, and a few very deserving winners.

So without any more preamble, let's go through the ballot and reveal my rankings: