Thursday, February 3, 2022

2022 Nerds of a Feather Hugo Awards Recommended Reading, Part 4: Institutional Categories

Welcome to the fourth and final instalment of the Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together 2022 Hugo Awards Longlist!

This time we are looking at what are, for lack of a better term, the "nonfiction and institutional categories": Best Related Work, Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine and Best Fancast. Some of these categories are the hardest to figure out eligibility for, either because they require intimate knowledge of Hugo rules ("Semiprozine", why are you a word in our vocabulary) or because the precedent for them has historically been weird (e.g. recognising the podcasts of profit-making websites in Best Fancast). Nonetheless, we have done our best, and ask that you a) forgive us and b) gently bother Adri on Twitter if you feel we've got something wrong.

There are still a couple of sticky issues that made putting this list together a bit difficult. For example, deciding on when to put single author ventures in fanzine or recognise their authors in fan writer (or both!) continues to pose a challenge. We have tried to create clear and consistent guidelines for inclusion in this category. Thus, we have tried to recognise publications in this category which are (1) a fan venture (i.e. must not generate a significant amount of money, or pay professional rates for work); (2) publishing a substantial amount of content under a unified "brand" in a given year; and (3) (obviously) publishing "award worthy" content.

We also feel obliged to mention that 'nerds of a feather, flock together' is eligible in this category but since we won a Hugo Award last year (thank you again!) and we want to help ensure the health of this category and recognize the wealth and richness of fan contributions, we previously announced we are recusing ourselves from Hugo Award nominations in 2022.  We'd much rather talk about all the other sites we like to read, anyway! 

This is usually the part where we say that we're not listing any Nerds of a Feather-eligible work due to conflicts of interest, but the editors are breaking with our usual policy on Best Related Work. Sure, we're biased, but we think Arturo's essay is
objectively too good not to include here.

Before moving on to the recommendations, we'd like to remind everyone once again that this list is not and does not intend to be a comprehensive survey of genre or fandom. Rather, these are recommendations we suggest you consider alongside whatever other candidates you have in mind.

Nerds of a Feather 2022 Recommendation List Series:

Related Work
Being Seen, Elsa Sjunneson (Simon Element)
A Brief History of Homestuck, Sarah Z (YouTube)
Debarkle, by Camestros Felapton (Camestros Felapton)
FIYAHCON 2021
The 2021 FuckAThon, Chronicles of Noria
Genre Grapevine, Jason Sanford (Patreon)
"I'm Colombian. Here's what 'Encanto' means to me"; Arturo Serrano (Nerds of a Feather)
Never Say You Can't Survive, by Charlie Jane Anders (MacMillan)
Resistance and Transformation: On Fairy Tales, Mari Ness (Aqueduct)
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, Abraham Riesman (Bantam Dell)
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, by David Weide
Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Francesca T. Barbini (ed) (Luna Press Publishing)
 
Semiprozine

Fanzine
Astrolabe (Aidan Moher) 
Black Nerd Problems (Omar Holmon and William Evans)
The Fantasy Inn (Team Fantasy Inn)
The Full Lid (Alasdair Stuart and Marguerite Kenner)
Hugo Book Club Blog (Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk)
Lady Business (Team Lady Business)
Journey Planet (Team Journey Planet)
The Quiet Pond (CW, Joce and Skye)
The Rec Center (Gavia Baker Whitelaw and Elizabeth Minkel)
Salon Futura (Cheryl Morgan)
SF in Translation (Rachel Cordasco)
Quick Sip Reviews (Charles Payseur)


Fancast
Chronicles of Noria
The Coode Street Podcast
The Fantasy Inn Podcast
The Functional Nerds
Hugo, Girl
Hugos There
Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men