Do you have a question about the Hugos that is not covered in our FAQ? If so, please ask it here and we will endeavor to answer it for you.
Please note, however, that we cannot issue definitive rulings about Hugo Award eligibility. Each year’s Worldcon establishes a Hugo Awards Administration Subcommittee the manages that year’s Hugo Awards. The Hugo Awards web site is not responsible for administering the Awards and therefore can’t give definitive answers about eligibility. If you have a question about whether a specific work is eligible and in which category, please contact the current year’s Worldcon and their Hugo Awards Administrators.
Thank you Kevin for your previous response. I have a quick follow-up question. How long has this two-stage selection process been in place? Is the process you’re currently employing the same one since the inception of the Hugo Awards?
One more thing (sorry, I just remembered this), is the process to add categories and change rules in general also the same historically? Can I infer that the current process as described on this site is the same one used when fanzines were added as a category? Do you know where I can find any sort of information on how/why they were added? Sorry to bother you with all these questions, but they could really help me with my project. Thanks again.
The two-stage process has been in place almost, but not quite, from the beginning of the creation of the Hugo Awards. The first year was a simpler one-stage process where you wrote in your favorite work, with no nominations, and the winner was the work with a plurality of votes. Beginning in 1959, the two-stage nominations/voting process was adopted and has been substantially unchanged since then.
The early Hugo Award categories were decided by the individual Worldcons at their own discretion. Later (after 1963, when the first WSFS Constitution was adopted), the WSFS Constitution included formal rules for the Hugo Awards, with the control over the categories in the hands of the members, not the organizing committees.
Update: Thanks to WSFS scholar Ben Yalow, we now have an article on this site called “A Short History of the Hugo Awards Process,” which I think addresses your questions.
Good Day,
Your FAQ’s say that to be considered a book must be “published”. Are self-published e-books considered as potential nominees or must the publication be through a traditional publisher? I ask this as I only see novels on your list published through TOR, Del Ray, Orbit, etc.
Can you clairfy?
Thank you for a very well put together and informative web site.
Regards,
SJ Parkinson
“Published” means “published.” It doesn’t mean “printed and distributed by a traditional publisher.” Works are not disqualified because they are (for example) self-published or published in non-print venues. For example, three of the four nominees for Best Short Story in the 2011 Hugo Awards were published electronically, not through “traditional” print magazines.
Works are not disqualified for being published in “non-traditional” formats. However, works have to get enough nominations from the voters to make the ballot, so if the voters don’t nominate such works, the works won’t appear on the ballot.
We’ve added your question and a version of this answer to our Frequently Asked Questions list. Thanks for contributing.
Is there a resource on the site for learning about Hugo-winning minority authors/creators? I am aware of the awards given to Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Ted Chiang, but would like to know more still.
Griffin:
We do not include any demographic information such as gender, ethnicity, residency, etc. about any Hugo Award winners. We list the winners’ names.
Has there ever been an african american winner for best novel?
Shamal: We don’t collect demographic details about winners, including race, gender, residence, or anything else about them. We collect the winners’ names.
Hello,
I’m just curious whether the Hugo Award ceremony was going to be streamed on the Internet this year. I’ve tried looking for info, but haven’t found any, so I’m assuming not, but it would be cool to be able to see it live. This might not be the proper place to ask, but I figured you guys might know, haha. Anyway, thanks a bunch. I’m looking forward to learning the results.
Cheers,
Christopher Nickolas Carlson
Chicon 7 does indeed plan to live-stream video of the ceremony, and we here at The Hugo Awards web site will be providing text-only CoverItLive coverage of the event as we have done for the past couple of years. (The latter is more appropriate if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth for video streaming, don’t want the ads that UStream puts on video streams, or want the results a few seconds faster than the video stream, since the latter is usually delayed from seconds to minutes for technical reasons.) We’ll be posting an announcement here when we know the details. If you haven’t already done so, you can follow the RSS feed of our announcements or follow us on Twitter, where we also will be posting the results as they are announced.
Hello, I am researching about Flowers for Algernon, written by Daniel Keyes.
I would like to know the exact year in which he received the Hugo Award. In his autobiography (Charlie,Algernon and I) and in his homepage, it says he won it in 1960, for the best short story of 1959, but in this homepage it says it was in 1967. I would appreciate if you can tell me which is correct.
Regards,
Leticia Kushida
Brazil
Leticia:
“Flowers for Algernon” won the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. The expanded novel was nominated for the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but did not win.
The rules of the World Science Fiction Society allow works to be nominated an additional time if they are substantially different, such as after a significant revision or expansion. Both the short story and the novel versions of the the work were nominated for Hugo Awards. The short story won in 1960, and the novel was nominated in 1967. I hope this clarifies the situation for you.
Dear Kevin, thank you so much. Your information helped a lot!!
Reegards,
Leticia
HI
DO YOU OFFER A LISTING OF winners only UNTIL present please?
could you please provide a link?
much appreciated
We list all past Hugo Award winners on our Hugo Award History Pages at http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/
Re: Related Works
Hello. Could a feature-length documentary film be submitted under the “Related Works” category? Has this ever happened? It would seem that documentaries don’t fit so neatly into the long form “dramatic” category.
Thanks.
That’s an interesting question. Every year the works that catch people’s eyes change somewhat, and of course WSFS tries to update the categories to keep pace. But questions like this still arise. To deal with this, each year a Hugo Awards Administrator is appointed. He or she is responsible for answering such questions, based on the existing rules, historical precedent and the will of the nominators/voters.
It seems reasonable to us that a documentary could be best located in the “Best Related Work” category, but it is not crystal clear and we are not aware of any historical precedent for this situation. Therefore we can’t give a firm answer.
We suggest that you contact this year’s Hugo Administrator at LoneStarCon 3 with your question.
I have a few questions about what categories certain publications fall under.
1. Toasted Cake is a fiction podcast that pays $5 for stories on the podcast. Because it pays any amount to authors, that makes it a semiprozine rather than a fancast, right?
http://www.toastedcake.com
2. Beam Me Up is a science fiction podcast and radio show. They don’t pay authors, which makes me think it might be a fancast. But since they also play their show on a radio station, it depends on whether the radio station provides more than 1/4 of the income. On the WRFR website it says “WRFR is entirely run by volunteers” which makes me think it might still qualify as a fancast, but I’m not totally sure.
http://www.beammeuppodcast.com/
http://wrfr.org/about.html
3. Journey Into… is a podcast. They don’t pay for flash fiction, which is the only work they take unsolicited. They do pay a small amount for longer work, which they solicit. Does the sometimes-payment make them a semiprozine or a fancast?
http://www.journeyintopodcast.blogspot.com
As with our earlier reply regarding Related Works, these are edge cases for which there is insufficient precedent to give a clear answer. Remember that while TheHugoAwards.org is the official web site of the Hugo Awards, we are not the administrators of the Awards and therefore anything we say is an advisory only and cannot be considered definitive. The people actually making the decision are this year’s Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee, and we suggest you contact them with your questions.
You may also want to consult the Semiprozine Directory web site. While it is not an official site, it does have a good working list of likely Semiprozines (and discussion of edge cases).
Once again, our discussion here is only advisory in nature, and only rulings from the current year’s Hugo Award Administrators are definitive.
I’m afraid I don’t follow your logic on Fancast. Where in the definition of fancast does it state that they can’t pay anyone? It simply says non-professional. If fancast had a contributor pay clause there wouldn’t be the need for semiprozine to include “which does not qualify as a fancast” in its definition. By the looks of things an audio or video podcast would be a fancast if it would have been eligible for either fanzine or semiprozine in print.
I know the intent on this category was to move podcasts out of fanzine, but the actual implementation has removed them from both fanzine and semiprozine.
Neil:
That’s true, and is something I hadn’t considered in my initial reply because I thought that I knew what the makers of the original proposal intended to do. This is one of the reasons we warn folks that nothing we say here has the force of legislation, and that without an actual ruling on a real case by a Hugo Administrator, we can’t be sure exactly what’s going to happen.
It is likely that there may need to be clarifying legislation unless the WSFS Business Meeting really wants podcasts, etc. that are non-professional by definition but that might meet the semi-professional definition to be included in Fancast. That is a plausible reading, since Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist are both covered by Semiprozine and Fanzine.
Hello,
- probably this is not the right place to ask, but I try it anyway
-
is there a compilation or some kind of HUGO-winning stories?
I realise that the novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories are published by many different publishing companies, but maybe some of the bigger houses have had multiple winners over the years and maybe made “collector’s edition” of some kind.
Is there something you could recommend, maybe put together in consultation with you?
(Yes, I can search for myself on amazon and the like, but I’d like to have your “official” answer, please excuse if offending.)
Best greetings from Germany
Thomas
Thomas:
While there have been compilations of Hugo Award-winning fiction in the past, there have not been recent collections except for The Hugo Award Showcase, the first (and ultimately only) in a projected series of collections of Hugo Award-nominated-and-winning works. Should a publisher once again undertake publishing such compilations, we will announce it on this site.
Hi,
I’d like to know if I can nominate an eligible project I crowdfunded , getting a sponsor or producer credit in return.
Thanks
We’re not sure what you mean about “getting a sponsor or producer credit in return.” Works are nominated for Hugo Awards by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Society, and works that receive sufficient nominations appear on the final ballot and are considered “Hugo Award Nominated” works.