Those of you who have not been following social media all afternoon may not yet have spotted the Hugo Award Finalist list. You can find it on Locus.

All in all it seems a very good list with many categories that are going to be hotly contested and very few Puppies. The list for Best Series looks very strong, which bodes well for the category in the future.

I am particularly delighted to see Ninni Aalto get a nod for Best Fan Artist. As far as I can see she’s the only Finn on the ballot. Please vote for her. Of course having only one Finn, and only one translated work, on the ballot is not a good result for a Worldcon in a non-English-speaking country. (Edit: sorry, two Finns; Vesa Lehtimäki is the other one.)

It is criminal that Lee Harris hasn’t got on the ballot. Hopefully he’s been cheered up by getting four of the six Novella slots for Tor.com publications.

There are two openly trans people on the Best Novel ballot, which is frankly amazing.

Thankfully I have read a lot of the nominees, because I don’t have much reading time now with the Tiptree stuff coming in. There are some on there I am very much looking forward to reading.

And that’s all I can think of headline-wise for now. Except for one thing. Why, Cheryl, you might be asking, did you point people at the Locus website for the list of finalists? Why not point them to the official Hugo Awards site which, you know, you actually maintain? Well, that’s because the Helsinki Hugo Admin team, in their wisdom, decided not to let the official Hugo Award website have any sight of the results. They didn’t even send us the press release after the awards were announced. It takes a while to format a web post from that data, and Kevin has only just had a chance to check what I’ve done. I’m going to go and put that live now.

Normally I’d put such things down to incompetence, but Kevin had been trying to get sight of the information for some time because he’s normally very busy at work during the time the announcement was made. Given that, I can only put this down to spite. Here’s hoping we have better luck trying to get the live coverage of the award ceremony done.

Update: Had a lovely email from Jukka. One of the frustrations of being a Worldcon chair is that the organization is way too big for you to know what goes on. You can have all of the good intentions in the world, and then someone at a lower level decides that they know better. I’ve seen this first hand watching Kevin do the job. It is doubtless harder with a multi-national team. Anyway, I feel a lot more confident about the ceremony coverage now.