Hugo 2014: Best Related Work

The Best Related Work category was really weak this year. I voted for Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss. It’s the only one of the nominees that’s truly ambitious, and represents serious effort and thought. It’s not the best How to write book I’ve read, but it’s at least something.

Queers Dig Time Lords amounts to an incredibly repetitious collection of might-as-well-be blog posts. The first two or three are interesting, but after that every different author says more or less the same thing, only with slight variations depending on whether they started with Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker/Peter Davison or Christopher Eccleston/David Tennant. I wouldn’t have guessed that the experience was so utterly non-unique and common.

Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary, is literally a collection of blog posts; and a month after reading it I can’t remember any of them except that I think that “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” was also included here as well as nominated separately. “We Have Always Fought” isn’t bad. It’s accurate and actually quite well written, which is probably why it’s included here; but it’s nothing that hasn’t been said before for at least 30 or 40 years.

The final nominee is Writing Excuses Season 8, a podcast I didn’t listen to because I don’t listen to podcasts. So maybe it’s great, I don’t know.

But overall, we’re getting close to just having a best blog/podcast category. The only actual longform related work nominated was Wonderbook. That’s a pretty poor showing.

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