The Voter's Packet for the Hugo Awards will be released shortly and made available to all members of Glasgow Worldcon. As is traditional, 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 2023. While the purpose of the Voter's Packet is to help eligible voters make an informed decision when casting their ballots, we are also making the packet available to all of our readers who may want to take a look back at what we did last year.
Below, you can find Adri'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.
Introduction
How do you begin an introduction to a seventh year of Hugo finalist work?
Perhaps you start by acknowledging that seven, to many people, is a bit magical. From seven sins to seven chakras to seven wonders and, of course, the destiny of that seventh son or daughter in the fairy tale, seven is an excellent number for things that are a bit… special. It’s a lot of items - more than a handful! - but you can’t put them equally into smaller categories, so you just have to step back and take in the whole seven-ness of it all. Magic.
Seven Hugo nominations. Wow. Being relevant and recognised as a fanzine (did you notice there are seven letters in “fanzine”? coincidence?) for the best part of a decade is beyond an honour: it’s an absolutely humbling vote of confidence from our readers. Out here, long after the heyday of the blog (yet somehow before the universal acceptance of blogs being legitimate fanzines), our team are out here putting words of criticism, analysis, conversation and pure nerdy joy onto www.nerds-feather.com, because we love doing it. (seven letters in “feather” as well…) That we are still finding our audience means more than we can possibly say. Thank you.
As always, we’re on the ballot in excellent company, both old and new: Black Nerd Problems, Idea, Hugo Book Club Blog, The Full Lid, and Journey Planet are all fantastic publications and it’s a delight to be recognised alongside them.
In house, our editorial team has grown in the last couple of years: along with our founders G and Vance, and our senior editors Joe and Adri (that’s me!) we’ve got a day-to-day editing dream team of Roseanna Pendlebury, Arturo Serrano and Paul Weimer helping Nerds of a Feather keep our schedules packed and our dreams on track. (seven editors, you say?). Paul is also recognised on the ballot for Best Fan Writer this year, and we wish him all the luck! This zine has always been a labour of collective love, and especially through the ups and downs of the last few years, it’s teamwork and mutual support that keeps the lights on for creative endeavours like ours. Our spectacular international flock of writers in 2023 (2+0+2+3 = 7) was Alex Wallace, Ann Michelle Harris, Chris Garcia, Clara Cohen, Dean E.S. Richard, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Haley Zapal, Joe DelFranco and Phoebe Wagner, and the only way we could ask for a better team is if we found some sort of cloning device and made more of them.
Also, several of us are from, or based in, the UK, so it’s particularly exciting to be recognised at a Scottish Worldcon (7 letters in Glasgow). Shout out to our fellow British Hugo nominees across all the categories!
2023 was a fantastic year for Nerds of a Feather: we nearly broke our all-time record for most pieces published in a single year (315!) (3-1+5 = 7) and took home a collective IGNYTE award for best critic, reinforcing our belief that we’re writing work that’s important to us and to our readers. As well as our packed schedule of reviews, essays and interviews, we also ran a new project in 2023 after taking a year off in 2022, as Star Wars Subjectivities (7 syllables) ran a series of essays and roundtables taking another look at this ever expanding nerd classic. In project lead G’s own words:
This project will follow a somewhat different format than our typical special modules. We will not be providing dossier-style reviews that present opinions with supporting evidence to make an argument that aspires to objectivity. Rather, we will lean into the subjectivity of our opinions with nakedly partisan feelpieces. Sometimes these will take the form of love letters or furious rants; sometimes they will be more measured. The point, ultimately, is just to be honest about how we feel, as individuals.
It’s no easy task putting together the highlights of a bumper year, but we hope this packet will guide both new and returning visitors through a few of our flock’s favourites from the year that was. Organised into five categories (it would have been seven, but we put together the packet before I came up with this bit), we’ve got a little bit of everything from everyone who wrote for us last year, so you can get a taste of what we think makes Nerds of a Feather so special. Of course, if you want more, it’s all available for free, as long as our hosting lasts, at www.nerds-feather.com: our chronological sidebar should make it easy to find the 2023 posts which are under consideration for this award.
As well as being magical, seven is, of course, also a lucky number for many, and I’d be lying if I said we don’t hope it’ll be lucky for us. But regardless of what the voters decide, we’re proud and humbled and super excited to be here on this seventh Hugo journey. Thank you for having us again, voters.
Table of Contents
Section I: Literature Reviews
Review: The Faithless by C. L. Clark
Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The October Daye reread: A Red Rose Chain
Review: Mammoths at the Gate
Microreview: The Jinn-bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu
Microreview: Gods of the Wyrdwood by R. J. Barker
The Wheel of Time reread: A Crown of Swords
Section II: AV Media Reviews
Asteroid City lays bare the scaffolding of narration
What's In An Adaptation: A Sapkowski Fanatic Watches Netflix's The Witcher
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse Review
Festival View - Intense Science Fiction Short Films of 2023
Section III: Conversations/Interviews
Adri and Joe Talk About Books: 2023 Hugo Award Finalists
Rereading The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix
6 More Books With Premee Mohamed
Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Novel
Section IV: Commentary
Lindsay, Leckie, and LeGuin: A century of pronouns and gender in SFF
The Writer's Guild of America is On Strike
Our Retellings are Dull: the Problem of the Modern Mythical Reimagining
So... let's talk about the 'Tok
Section V: Star Wars Subjectivities
On Andor Translating Theory into Community Action
