Monday, July 17, 2023

2023 Hugo Award Voter's Packet

The Voter's Packet for the Hugo Awards will be released shortly and made available to all members of the Chengdu Worldcon and Nerds of a Feather has put together a compilation of what we feel represents the best and the breadth of our collective work published in 2022. While the purpose of the Voter's Packet is to help eligible voters make an informed decision when casting their ballots, we wanted to also make this available to all of our readers who may want to take a look back at what we did last year. As such, below is Roseanna's introduction to the Voter's Packet followed by the Table of Contents with links to each of the essays, reviews, and features we included in the packet.

If you'd like, you can download the files we included in the Voter's Packet and take Nerds of a Feather on the go:
We also have a Chinese translation available in PDF:

羽毛上的书虫

2023雨果奖入围作品阅读包



We hope you enjoy!



Introduction

When I joined Nerds of a Feather back in 2021, they had not long received a Hugo nomination, and were waiting (presumably with at least somewhat bated breath) for the results. Two days after my first review went up on the site, the breath was unbated, and they found out they were Hugo winners. I'd already been excited to just get my own reviewing shared on this site full of critique and analysis and thought and opinion and altogether just really interesting discussion of all things SFF media - that excitement was only increased when it became a Hugo-winning one. Now, two years later, and Nerds of a Feather get to relive that excitement - but this time, I get to be a part of it, rather than just a (very enthusiastic) newcomer on the sidelines - and I have to say I was somewhat unprepared for how utterly proud I am of it, and to be part of a team whose combined works were interesting enough, engaging enough that a number of people felt compelled to write our name in the little box.

To those people - thank you. Truly.

With all the changes we're seeing in the online landscape at the moment, sometimes by the minute on certain bird-shaped websites, the thing that really stands out to me and that keeps bringing me back online is the community, the people whose words get put out there on the internet, full of feeling about the things that matter to them. It's a vulnerable thing, putting an essay out into the virtual world, especially when your opinions touch on personal themes, your own experiences, how the media you're discussing intersects with your identity and worldview. You're opening yourself up for comment and criticism alike, and even the compliments can sometimes feel A Lot. That so many people keep doing it, keep making these beautiful, thoughtful pieces on media of all kinds, is part of what makes it worth celebrating. Whether that be fanzines, fancasts, published essays, twitter threads or whatever else, there's always someone willing to put their soul out there to say "this is why this story means something to me".

The team here at Nerds of a Feather has changed in the last two years, but the commitment to being part of that community hasn't. Though we've said goodbye to beloved colleagues off to newer challenges, and welcomed in keen new faces, the core of what we do has remained the same: we are still here to share, discuss and dissect the works of SFF media that we think are worth that discussion, and to try to be a great place of genuinely insightful commentary, as part of that wider community of reviewers, fan and creators.

However, with such a vast well of media to draw on - now more than ever - there are only so many hours in the day and nerds of the proverbial feather and we simply cannot cover them all. But we hope - we intend - to cover the ones we truly think merit the conversation. Some of these are works everyone will have heard of, the ones that form the bigger discussions across fandom spaces. Some of these are lesser known works, ones close to our various hearts, that we think more people would love like we do, if only they knew they existed in the first place.

As such, we've provided a curated selection here of works from all our contributors in 2022, covering at least some of the various things we do. From Adri Joy, Arturo Serrano, Dean E. S. Richard, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, The G, Joe del Franco, Joe Sherry, Paul Weimer, Phoebe Wagner, Roseanna Pendlebury, Sean Dowie and Vance Kotrla, here is what we hope is an enticing insight into what Nerds of a Feather was all about in 2022, and I'm grateful to have the opportunity to share it with you, as well as proud. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed creating them.

We would also like to take this time to congratulate Haley Zapal for being a second-time finalist for Best Fancast as part of Hugo, Girl. It is is well deserved and we are so happy for her as well as for Lori, Amy, and Kevin. Likewise, congratulations to Chris Garcia and our friends at Journey Planet for their fanzine nomination - as always, we are honoured to share a category with you all.

~Roseanna



Section I: Literature Reviews
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