My Hugo award votes 2019 part 4: related works

The best related works was a very varied category. Nominees were a net site achieving a huge amount of fan fiction, a documentary about why the trilogy of the Hobbit movies is so shitty, a history of Hugo winners, a memorabilia net site of Mexican authors who were visiting the last Worldcon, an interview book of Ursula K. Le Guin and a very detailed history of an important scifi-pulp Astounding science fiction. Fan fiction has never really been very interesting to me. I have ever read only a couple pieces of it. So the archive was pretty lukewarm for me. Neither did I find the travelogue of the Mexicans and samples of their fiction very interesting at all. The YouTube video series about the Hobbit was excellent and explained what was so wrong with that series. Personally, I stopped watching at the scene where dwarfs were escaping inside barrels in a stream. Just too stupid and cartoonish to be tolerated…

All three books were excellent. The one detailing Astounding spent a bit too much wordage for Ron Hubbard, but, apparently, he was a very important person for John W. Campbell, the long-term editor of Astounding. But it was altogether a very good and comprehensive history book, and I am now about 60% through it, and I will write a more detailed review of it later.

The History of Hugos was a fascinating discussion about almost all winners and nominees until the year 2000. I wonder why that was used as a cutoff point – will there be a part two someday? Most opinions in the book were well justified, even if I didn’t always agree. There were some slight editing issues, as the material was first published as a blog. I got a fairly long addition to my TBR pile from this book.

The interview book with Ursula K. Le Guin consists of three parts. All three were interesting, but it is a pity that the most interesting one, the one about fiction, was by far the shortest one.

My voting order in this category is as follows:


1. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee

2. An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards 1953-2000, by Jo Walton

3. The Hobbit Duology (a documentary in three parts), written and edited by Lindsay Ellis and Angelina Meehan

4. Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon

5. Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

6. The Mexicanx Initiative Experience at Worldcon 76 by Julia Rios, Libia Brenda, Pablo Defendini, and John Picacio