Tor will collect Jo Walton's excellent series of essays on the winners and nominees of the past Hugos in a book called An Informal History of the Hugos coming in July 2017.
The Hugo Awards have been the locus of controversy thanks to a multi-year assault by alt-right/white supremacist groups who argued that the small number of nominees whose work featured diverse characters and/or was written by diverse authors was evidence of a hypothetical "social justice warrior" conspiracy, which justified their own non-hypothetical conspiracy to fill the ballot with books by and/or about reactionary politics, dudes, and/or white people.
Walton, the author of some of the field's best retrospective reviews also wrote a Hugo-award winning fictionalized memoir about her journey through science fiction in the 1970s.
The Hugo Awards, named after pioneer science-fiction publisher Hugo Gernsback, and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society, have been given out since 1953. They are widely considered the most prestigious award in science fiction.
Between 2010 and 2013, Jo Walton wrote a series of posts for Tor.com, surveying the Hugo finalists and winners from the award’s inception up to the year 2000. Her contention was that each year’s full set of finalists generally tells a meaningful story about the state of science fiction at that time.Walton’s cheerfully opinionated and vastly well-informed posts provoked valuable conversation among the field’s historians. Now these posts, lightly revised, have been gathered into this book, along with a small selection of the comments posted by SF luminaries such as Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, and the late David G. Hartwell.
An Informal History of the Hugos [Jo Walton/Tor]
Revealing Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos
[Tor.com]
