Completed 6/22/2025 Reviewed 6/23/2025
In this blog entry, I review and rank the six Hugo nominees for Best Related Work. These are non-fiction, genre-related articles, books, and one YouTube documentary. They were all excellent. A few I did not finish completely, but got a good gist of their content. Here’s my list in the order of most to least favorite.
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll – This short book blew me away so much that I already wrote a review for it. The link to it is here: Speculative Whiteness. Seriously, I believe this is something that every sci fi fan should read. I never knew how the alt- and far-right have been appropriating science fiction for a long time. It was an eye opener.
r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge by the r/Fantasy Bingo Team (r/Fantasy on Reddit) – The Fantasy subreddit on Reddit has had an annual Bingo game where you read 25 books from different categories to fill your Bingo Card. This year, they included an interesting and amusing review of the last ten years of the Bingo, following its development from the initial release with about 70 participants to present where there were over 800 participants. The post also included some of the best posts on the subreddit. One year, a middle school teacher provided a list of books that could be used for each square if you wanted to read all YA books. There were about two to five recommendations for each square with a short blurb about the books’ plot and why it would fit that category.
“The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion” by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford – This was an excellent report on the controversial 2023 Hugos which were held in China. Through Barkley and Sanford’s investigation, they came to the conclusion that categories for books, stories, new authors, fan writers, etc had exclusions due to the western members of the nominating committee’s self-censorship so as to not rile the Chinese government and Chinese big business sponsors. The most notable exclusion was the amazing Nebula winner Babel by R. F. Kuang. However, this also affected other books, authors, and creators who were clearly eligible for nominations.
“Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics” by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones – Another look at the controversy from 2023, this time by using statistical analysis. The Cliff refers to the top books from the long list receiving the best scores based on the number of nominating votes. On a graph, they scored extremely high while the rest were very low, creating a visual “cliff.” Though much of the analysis went over my head (I took probability and statistics in college…over 40 years ago LOL), I still found it pretty interesting.
Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum – Nussbaum writes reviews for genre magazines as well as her blog…like me 😊. However, she is much more skilled at the art of reviewing than I. She has many comparisons to other works, including non-genre. Her reviews read much more like English papers, something I was never very good at (dangling preposition). This book collects her reviews of genre books, stories, and even films, gathering them into categories, like Space, Body, and Tales. I did not finish this book as I find just reading a lot of reviews to become rather tedious. Even when I read reviews online, I can only read a couple at a time, especially when they are as brilliantly written and analyzed as these are. So I skipped around a lot, finding reviews of books I’ve read and others I want to read. I’m ranking this rather low on the list for that reason. However, if I rated this book on its own after reading the whole thing, I would probably give it at least 4 stars out of 5.
“The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” by Jenny Nicholson (on YouTube) – This online video review is a very detailed look at the Star Wars immersive experience hotel at Disney World. Through the smart use of preview videos from Disney and footage filmed from her own experience at the hotel, Nicholson created a four-hour-long review on how the Hotel was a failure. It wasn’t all bad. There were certainly some good points, but she was very disappointed considering the steep price tag. I will admit that I did not watch all of it. Four hours is long for any documentary style video. I watched the first hour and a half, then skipped around. Nicholson was very thorough and articulate. And she comes from the perspective of a theme park and Star Wars uber-fan. But alas, I ranked this last out of the tough competition in this category. If I watched it to completion and reviewed her review, I would probably give it four stars out of five.
Well, that’s my list. I believe it’s a very tight race, with all the works being excellent in their own way. It’s unfortunate to have to rank them, but this is my list from my perspective. I’m in the middle of watching the Short and Long Form Video nominees, but will return with reviews for the Graphic Novel category.
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