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I must have been seven or eight when I told my uncle Danny that I liked science fiction, meaning, I think, that I liked Star Wars and The Rocketeer and a copy of Barlowe’s Extraterrestrials that I had found in my elementary school library. The next time we saw each other, Danny gave me a cardboard box of old paperbacks, and a post-it note with a list written in pencil of every novel that had won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, with circles around books that won both.
I loved reading those books, and I already loved writing. I do not remember ever thinking, back then, “I’m going to get really good at writing and one day maybe I’ll win a Hugo Award!” I always assumed on some level that the awards were inaccessible, the way a fantasy landscape is inaccessible. You can’t get to Middle Earth from here.
And in May, This is How You Lose the Time War won the Nebula Award for Best Novella. And last night, it won the Hugo. In New Zealand! Which is not Middle Earth. But which I couldn’t reach anyway, because of the pandemic. But regardless.
Thanks to the marvel of modern technology, you can watch Amal and me accept the award at this link (which is not actually a link to the official ceremony video, because that's not on youtube & I can't figure out how to link to a specific timestamp of the official one). The wonder and disbelief is real: the livestream froze, so we did not actually hear our names announced! They just cut to us, and we realized in that moment that we had won. We’d written our speech beforehand, but—well, for me at least, writing a speech is like digging waterworks: you carve ditches and lay pipe and position waterwheels and it’s painstaking work. And then you raise the floodgates and the water rushes in and all of a sudden the wheels begin to move in ways that you could perhaps have anticipated, but to anticipate is not to watch the wheel turn, dripping, in the current, and grind grain.
I feel so blessed to have been part of this book finding its people. And so, so happy to have done this together with my best friend in publishing. Red and Blue and their correspondence don’t seem like our creations so much as potentials that found expression through our work. Maybe the whole book is one of their letters.
It was a different sort of Hugo ceremony. (Another sentence I don’t think fifteen-year-old me would have ever believed he would one day type—suggesting as it does that one might have been proximate to enough ceremonies to have comparative opinions.) My memory of Helsinki in 2017 is a bit hazy, because I’d failed to do some basic math. The finalist’s reception in Finland started in the early evening, so I dressed for the ceremony around three thirty, failing to appreciate that I wouldn’t have a chance to eat until about ten. By the time they were announcing the winner of the semiprozine category (it’s not a pharmaceutical or a Pokemon, I swear), cannibalism seemed an attractive option. By comparison, it was great to be able to attend the ceremony and eat dinner, try to work a crossword with Steph, make kale chips, tidy the house, and pace and pace and pace. And listen to the speeches.
And what finalist speeches! By turns honest and cutting and heartfelt, authors and editors taking their moment to address the world. (And our editor, Navah Wolfe, won for Best Editor! For the second year in a row! As is her right and proper due, because she is amazing.)
Jeanette Ng’s speech in particular was incandescent. She received the Best Related Work award for her acceptance speech, last year, for the award at that time named the Campbell Award—in which speech she called out the award’s namesake for his fascism, among other things, which in turn prompted the award’s name to be changed to the Astounding Award. One line in her acceptance speech this year, about her surprise at the response to her 2019 speech, stuck with me: “I thought we all knew, and we had all decided it was okay.”
That hit me deeply. I’ve used those exact words myself in other contexts—maybe you have too. You see someone acting in a way you believe is out of line, and assume that because they are doing so and the community has not stopped them yet, the community doesn’t think that behavior is out of line, and if you say something it’ll be just you against all of them. But in fact, ‘the community’ is just made of individual people, and what’s so often the case is, everyone believes everyone else is okay with this, whatever this is, because they’re not speaking up, so they decide not to speak up either. It’s so important to raise our voices, and—harder—to make people feel that when they do raise theirs, they will be heard.
I can’t imagine a better end for the night than Arkady Martine’s acceptance speech for A Memory Called Empire, about the question of whether it is possible to belong, about facing the knife’s edge of hospitality. I can’t do it justice—it was a note of solemnity with a hard & uneasy joy at its core.
That sharp question of belonging was intended, I think, to address much larger concerns than those of genre communities—but it dovetailed in interesting ways with the narrative history elements of the evening. I’ll confess, I drifted in and out for most of the ceremony in which awards were not actively being accepted—it took a long time, and maybe some of you have achieved the true enlightened practice of effortless housekeeping and parenting in a pandemic, but our current low and frantic level of attainment in this regard means there’s always more to do, whether or not I'm wearing a nice suit, and on top of that I was too nervous to sit still—but watching the speeches I was struck by how big and grand and passionate and urgent and interesting the genre is today. There have been so many changes—changes not of assimilation, but of growth and transformation and genesis. You look at the fire and the range, the power and the invention of the winners and finalists from the fan categories on to Best Novel in 2020 and it’s miraculous to see how what was, has become what is—and how it's growing still.
Anyway, if you have an hour and forty five minutes to spare, the video I linked above is an edited version of the ceremony that focuses on the speeches, with a bit of connective tissue. It's a good way to get a sense of the breadth of the night, and see some truly great writers and editors share their voices, their truth, their power. You can find the full video of the ceremony here.
Go over to Amal's newsletter (and subscribe as long as you're there) and get her take on the night, too. And here's our speech:
M: Kia Ora! We’re so honored to accept this award. Thank you so much, to everyone who read and loved This Is How You Lose the Time War, and to everyone who voted for it in a year when our fellow finalists are so staggeringly brilliant. We admire you and your work so much, and it’s been an honor to be part of this cohort.
A: We’re forever grateful to everyone who helped make all of this possible—to all the volunteers at ConZealand who’ve been working so hard to do absolutely unprecedented work on this scale, thank you so much for all you’ve done—and to everyone who made our book possible: Navah Wolfe, the best editor we could have hoped for (and the BEST EDITOR point final! Boom! Has now won a Hugo twice!!), to DongWon Song, agent most extraordinary, and to everyone at Saga Press & Jo Fletcher Books who worked to get our book into the world, including but not limited to Greg Stadnyk, Molly Powell, Jo Fletcher, and Milly Reid.
M: I’d like to thank my wife Stephanie, always and forever. Also my parents and my sister for their constant support since my first scrawled, phonetically spelled stories, and Bob and Sally Neely who give copies of my books to everyone they know—and Uncle Danny for the Zelazny and Leiber and Uncle Paul for the Star Trek tapes.
A: I want to thank my husband Stu for everything from tea to terrible puns, and my parents and siblings for a lifetime of cheering on my writing, for their steadiness and constancy in the face of myriad upheavals. I can never thank them enough.
M: Annual celebrations—anniversaries, cons—have a way of sneaking up on you. There’s a cascading, lightning quality to the memories they evoke: you’re living your everyday life and then all of a sudden you cross some invisible threshold and there you are, connected with last year and the year before all the way back to the beginning. And even earlier than that.
A: For many of us, this Worldcon may feel like a break in a chain; but we invite you to think of it, instead, as a broadening of space, a widening of our circles. In a sense this is as “world” as the con has ever been; a vision of worldcon in a world where the only borders are lines in time.
M: To travel in time you have to understand time. There’s no one history of the world—every telling leaves things and people out. But everything that happens, has happened.
A: We’re taught history as if it’s a letter written from the past and addressed to us, but if that’s true it’s a letter from a sybil or a spy, allusive, full of hidden meanings and secret writing. The work of a life is learning to read between its lines—and then, learning to reply.
M: But you can’t write back to the past. You can only write to the future. So, write.
A: Write, we have always been here.
M: Write, it doesn’t have to be like this.
A: Write, it gets better, because we will make it better, together.
M: Write, this is how we win.
A: Kia Ora. Thank you all, so much
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