2005 Hugo winners

[Aitch Eye]

From the Interaction (this years WorldCon) website, where they also have detailed voting statistics for the final ballot and nominations:

http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/hugo.htm


Best Novel: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Best Novella: "The Concrete Jungle" by Charles Stross

Best Novelette: "The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link

Best Short Story: "Travels with My Cats" by Mike Resnick

Best Related Book: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
Edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn



Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: The Incredibles
Written & Directed by Brad Bird

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: "33" - Battlestar Galactica
Written by Ronald D. Moore and Directed by Michael Rymer.



Best Professional Editor: Ellen Datlow

Best Professional Artist: Jim Burns

Best Semiprozine: Ansible -- not Locus, but Ansible. Really.
Edited by David Langford

Best Web Site: SciFiction (www.scifi.com/scifiction)
Edited by Ellen Datlow. Craig Engler, general manager



Best Fanzine: Plokta
Edited by Alison Scott, Steve Davies and Mike Scott

Best Fan Writer: David Langford

Best Fan Artist: Sue Mason


John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not a Hugo Award): Elizabeth Bear

Special Interaction Committee Award (not a Hugo Award): David Pringle

 

[Krug]

The Concrete Jungle can be read here.

 

[Aitch Eye]

Ah, yes. That should have occurred to me..

The Faery Handbag

Travels With My Cats

I haven't gotten around to reading the Resnick yet, but the Link and Stross stories are certainly worth reading, and likely to stay up for awhile (the Stross story is under a Creative Commons license, so you can put it up on your own website if you'd like). "The Faery Handbag" is one of the more acclaimed stories of the year.

Link has also made her first collection, Stranger Things Happen available for download in a variety of formats to help promote her current collection, Magic For Beginners.

 

[MonsterMash]

Funnily enough all the nominees for the best novel were British

 

[Wombat]

I am quite pleased that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (JS&MN) won for best novel, but the book is in that amusing position that I have seen a few times before with other works. I can best compare it to The Name of the Rose and A Brief History of TIme -- books bought by a great number of people, but read by far fewer.

JS&MN is, in many ways, a book made for me and for my sister -- long, dense, slowly paced, with a great number of very accurate historical touches, a bow to Jane Austen, a nod to Patrick O'Brian, and with a sense of both whimsy and sadness on top of it, all held together with the more dangerous form of faerie tales. At least two different people asked me, "Does it ever pick up the pace?" I had to honestly tell them, "No. But it's not meant to." Thus I know a great number of people who own the book, a large percentage of them who have started it, and almost none who have finished it.

So, bravo for the win! Maybe this will convince a few more people to finish JS&MN. It really is worth it.

 

[Aitch Eye]

Some people have assumed that the best novel list was the result of British voters giving a homefield advantage, however as Cheryl Morgan (last years winner for Best Fanzine) pointed out at Emerald City:

"At the time this year’s Hugo nominations closed Interaction had around 500 British members. In contrast, every member of Noreascon 4 [in Boston -- Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire] was eligible to nominate. All 5500+ of them. Of those, only a hundred or so are likely to have been British, and that group will have had a very strong overlap with the membership of Interaction. There could have been as many as 10 times as many American fans eligible to nominate for Interaction’s Hugos as Brits. So if the Best Novel short-list this year is all-British then American fans have only themselves to blame."

She goes on to point out that most of the short fiction was still American, and that while River of Gods and The Algebraist had only been released in the UK, Iron Sunrise had only been released in the U.S. -- Stross is basically writing for the American market, I believe all the British releases of his novels have been reprints of books that were originally contracted for by U.S. publishers. The others had simultaneous releases, and very few fantasy books have been as heavily promoted as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Stross points out that a big factor was that a lot of major authors were between releases. On a vaguely related note, back in March the reviews editor for Locus predicted the 2006 best novel nominees:

The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
Olympos, Dan Simmons
Accelerando, Charles Stross
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson


If you go back over the last few years of nominations, you'll see how he came up with this, though most of those hadn't come out at the time (if any).