This year’s Locus Award winners were announced yesterday. As they are fan-voted, they are an interesting indicator as to how the Hugos might go, and of course are a major honor in their own right. The full list of winners is here. I’d like to highlight a few things.
The non-fiction award went to Kameron Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revolution. I imagine there will be a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth in Puppydom over that.
Ken Liu won for Collection with The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and the VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Science Fiction (which contains a number of translated stories — 30 if I have counted correctly) won Anthology.
All three short fiction awards went to women: Amal El-Mohtar, Alyssa Wong and Seanan McGuire. I am particularly delighted to see Every Heart a Doorway win.
There are five novel categories. Two were won by trans authors (Charlie Jane Anders and Yoon Ha Lee), one by translation (original by Cixin Liu), and one by a Welshman (Al Reynolds). And I don’t think that Joe Hill is exactly the sort of white, American male that the Puppies would want to win.
Special congratulations are due to Charlie Jane Anders and Yoon Ha Lee. CaitlÃn R. Kiernan has won a Locus Award before with a short story, but as far as I can see no openly trans person has won for a novel before. (Tiptree also won a couple of short fiction awards, but of course that’s complicated.) And if you haven’t read Ninefox Gambit yet, why not?