We at Lady Business are excited to announce that we have accepted a place on the final ballot for Best Fanzine in the 2016 Hugo Awards.
This is a strange year to be be a Hugo finalist. If you've been following the Hugo Awards, you know that the last couple of years have been controversial. We prefer not to dwell on the controversy here, but if you’re unfamiliar and would like a summary, Fanlore has a good overview. After the 2016 finalists were announced, one of the original five Fanzine finalists, Black Gate, withdrew from consideration. The Hugo administrators contacted us to let us know that we were next in the voting tally, and offered us the open slot. After some conflicted deliberation, we decided that we wanted to acknowledge the people who voted for us in the nomination phase, and we accepted a place on the final list.
The nomination is, in my opinion, well deserved. Lady Business is a fantastic genre blog, featuring great writing, incisive critique and an approach that manages to be fun and challenging at the same time (which is a really hard act to pull off). And they cover a lot of stuff that gets short shrift elsewhere, like fan fiction. So please join us in congratulating our friends at Lady Business and wishing them the best of luck in the final round of voting!