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Hugo voting (theoretically) opens this week, and I want to talk about one particular category.
We've got a couple of forms in this category - four books, one film, one speech. Obviously the speech stands out for being the shortest, and being an oddity; it's the third or fourth time a speech has been nominated.
I also think the speech should *win*.
Here's my pitch: fundamentally, Best Related is about who we are as a community. The whole Hugos are about that, but Best Related lets us directly talk about what we value.
Four of the works nominated are about dead creators. Important people with huge legacies and influence... but. Dead. Another is a memoir, a look back at a life lived, a trajectory followed.
Jeannette Ng's speech is unique among the nominees. It is vigorously forward looking. It is immediately active. It created change (Astounding Award), and demanded more change.
The rest of the ballot are works seeking to look back at the field and see where we are. Ng's speech looks at where the field is now and *demands* that we move forward, and make changes, and take action.
Ng looks in ("Campbell... was a fascist") and out (HKers "have held laser pointers to the skies and tried to to impossibly set alight the stars"), and refuses to look away from either, and demands that we also look, and make changes.
The other works are aspirational by looking to the past for inspiration. Ng's speech is aspirational by *rejection* of the past as our guiding light ("we have grown wonderful, ramshackle genre, wilder and stranger than [Campbell's] mind could imagine or allow").
Ng's speech is forceful, demanding, and calls us to action in the present and continuing action in the future, in our genre and beyond it.
I think that kind of speaking, that kind of work, and that kind of clarion call, is *exactly* what we should be recognising with a Hugo in 2020, and in every year.
... and link to the speech because of course ending on that forceful note means I'd have to add an addendum https://medium.com/@nettlefish/john-w-campbell-for-whom-this-award-was-named-was-a-fascist-f693323d3293
