who only by moving can balance

The Theory of Related-ivity:

A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category

by Heather Rose Jones

(This is a serialized article exploring the history of the Best Related Work Hugo category in its various names and versions.)

Contents

Part 1: Background

1.1 Author’s Preface

1.2 Introduction and Definitions

1.3 Prior Analyses

Part 1: Background

1.1 Author’s Preface

I was inspired to do this study when my co-author Camestros Felapton and I were chosen as Finalists for the Best Related Work Hugo award in 2025 for “Charting the Cliff,” our incredibly geeky statistical analysis of the 2023 Hugo nomination data and its discrepancies. Having a personal stake in the question “What is it that fans consider to be a ‘Related Work’ and how has it changed?” I thought I’d apply my love of analysis (which is what got me the nomination) to this question.

In writing this essay, I’ve considered an audience that may know relatively little about the Hugo Awards and their process, so more knowledgeable people will need to have patience. And, in the end, it will probably be an awkward mix of too much information and too much assumed knowledge.

Don’t expect an entertaining narrative history. My forte is the cataloging and organization of data, with a layer of interpretive analysis. The story is not linear and will loop back and jump ahead at various times, with similar topics being discussed in different places depending on greatest relevance. I’ve tried to present data in the manner that presents the analysis most clearly, whether through graphs, tables, or anecdotal discussion.

There is unavoidably a great deal of my own personal judgment in how the data is coded, though I have always included explanations of my process. I’ve tried to avoid inserting personal opinions about how the Best Related award ought to behave in describing how it is observed to behave, but I do highlight a number of topics for consideration at the end, and some of my own thoughts will leak through at that point.

The raw data and its coding is too extensive to include comfortably in this publication itself, but a copy has been made available for viewing or download at the following URLs:

Google Drive: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Sojroh-_1-NRWV5WQxYrAXk1QKugJZM/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=110580997919408742446&rtpof=true&sd=true

Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mfa8wdwxou7z7tjfczg67/Theory-of-Related-ivity-Data.xlsx?rlkey=qj3za4m1xecdpbvudx255gpc6&st=21iyh39p&dl=0

1.2 Introduction and Definitions

"World Science Fiction Society,” "WSFS,” "World Science Fiction Convention,” "Worldcon,” "NASFiC,” "Lodestar Award,” "The Hugo Award,” the Hugo Award Logo, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Rocket are service marks of Worldcon Intellectual Property, a California non-profit corporation managed by the Mark Protection Committee of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.[1]

The Best Related Work Hugo award has had three different names across its lifetime, with accompanying changes in scope. When this study refers to “Non-Fiction,” “Related Book,” or “Related Work,” it means a specific period of time and set of data when it bore that name. “Best Related” refers to the entire history of the award and the full dataset.

As a formatting convention, documentary text quoted from other sources will be formatted as a block quote. The source (usually a website) and date accessed (if relevant) will be cited. Such quotations will be reproduced as-is and may not match the editorial conventions of the overall document.

References to various data subsets and data types that are being analyzed will be capitalized (e.g., Finalist, Podcast, Biography). One point of possible confusion is that “Category” (capitalized) will refer to the content type groupings however “category” (uncapitalized) will be used frequently to refer to “award categories” such as Best Related Work, Best Fancast, etc.[2]

The Hugo Awards are a set of annual awards given by the membership of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) for people and works relevant to the field of speculative fiction and its fans. The awards were first given in 1953 and have been presented (with a few exceptions) every year since then. The award categories and requirements are established via the constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, which is revised and amended via the annual business meeting held in conjunction with Worldcon. Over the years, there have been many additions, changes, and occasionally removals of categories via revisions to the Constitution.[3]

As an unofficial overview, the current set of awards can be classified in several ways. One classification divides them into “fiction awards,” “awards for other types of works,” and “awards for people.” Another way to categorize them is “professional awards” (for people and works aligned with the business side of the field) versus “fan awards” (for people and works aligned with the fan community). Neither of these ways of categorizing are comprehensive and there is often debate over where a nominee should appear.

A general rule is that a work (as opposed to a person) should only be eligible in one award category. Thus, as new categories have been created to reflect growing areas of activity or interest, works that previously had been eligible in one category might shift to a different category. The Best Related award has regularly been affected by these shifts as it has often been viewed as a catch-all for works that don’t fit well into a more specific category.

Some award categories have fixed requirements for eligibility, such as the word-count requirements for the fiction categories and the restrictions on when the work appeared. Other eligibility factors might be better considered to be based on “vibes.” What counts as a Dramatic Presentation? Who counts as a Fan versus a Professional? What types of media might a Fanzine manifest as? Which category should an opera about the history of fandom fall into?

Hugo Awards are given for work appearing or performed in the previous year. For example, awards given in 2025 were for works published or released, or for activities performed in 2024.[4] References in this study are to the award year, not the publication year, unless otherwise noted.

Choosing the Hugo Award Winners is a two-step process. The first round is crowd-sourced nominations by the eligible members of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), which is to say the membership of the current Worldcon and the immediately previous Worldcon. People may nominate up to a fixed number of items in each award category. Those nominations are then collated and converted into a Finalist list. At the time the Best Related award was first established, selection of Finalists was based on the total number of valid nominations. At a later point in the award’s history, a significant revision was made to how nominations were processed, in order to mitigate the potential effects of slate nominating.[5]

At a certain point, it was also formalized to define a “Long List” of nominees that included all nominees meeting certain criteria: typically, Finalists plus the next 10 most popular nominees, by whatever system is being used at the time.

Nominees that have been identified as Finalists are then vetted for meeting the eligibility requirements of the award category. If a prospective Finalist is determined not to be eligible, then the next runner-up is made a prospective Finalist and vetted. After the Finalists are identified but before they are announced, a reasonable effort is made to contact the Finalists, both to allow a chance to withdraw if desired and to allow for the identification of any previously unknown information regarding eligibility. Nominees below the Finalist threshold are not necessarily vetted for eligibility. Therefore, the Long List represents more of a raw snapshot of what has been nominated, while the Finalists represent nominees that have been verified as eligible. This is of particular interest for Related Work, as the Long List often includes works where eligibility is questionable or uncertain.

The second stage of the award process is for members of the current Worldcon (in the year the award is given) to rank their choices in each award category (including the choice of “no award”). By a calculation process known as “ranked choice” or “instant runoff” voting, the Winner and ordering of the runners up are determined.

This study primarily focuses on the nomination process (though Winners are also analyzed) and will refer to community participants as “nominators” or some more generic term. If the selection of Winners from among the Finalists is being discussed, then the term “voters” may be used to distinguish participation at the two different stages. The people given named credit for creating the work will be referred to as “authors” regardless of whether they functioned as writers or editors and regardless of the amount they contributed to the work.

There are two types of status for a Hugo award. The fixed award categories, as noted above, are established in the WSFS Constitution. For a category to be added, revised, or removed, a change is proposed and debated in the business meeting and must be approved in two consecutive annual business meetings before becoming effective beginning with the subsequent year’s awards. However, each year’s Worldcon committee also has the right and ability to hold one special award category. Nominees, Finalists, and Winners of a special Hugo award have the same status as those of the “constitutional categories” and official lists (such as those at Wikipedia) often make no distinction. Special categories have often been used as trial balloons for proposed new constitutional categories (as happened for Related Work) but the existence of a special category doesn’t guarantee permanent addition. Not all Worldcon committees have chosen to exercise the option to hold a special category.

1.3 Prior Analyses

This is not the first survey and analysis of the Best Related award. Selected others are presented here.

Lew Wolkoff 1986

In the 1986 Worldcon business meeting,[6] Lew Wolkoff presented an analysis of the first 6 years of Best Non-Fiction Book (the initial era of Best Related), in combination with research into prior awards for non-fiction works. The general thrust of his analysis was to criticize a number of Finalists as being only distantly related to the category definition. In particular he called out books combining art with imaginative text, such as After Man or Barlowe’s Guide to Extra Terrestrials, and photography albums of SFF authors. He categorized the Finalists in his data set into 6 groups: fanzine, photography, picture books with an SFF theme, art books, biography (including autobiography), studies of a particular property or author, and works of SFF history or criticism. More details of Wolkoff’s analysis, along with his conclusions, are discussed in the Administrative History section under Minor Rewording. Wolkoff’s categories remain identifiable topics throughout the history of the award, although he combines groupings that this study classified under two separate aspects: Media and Category.

Nicholas Whyte 2021

In 2021, multiple-time Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte posted an analysis of the Winners and Finalists in Best Related up to that date.[7] He noted that in 28 out of 41 years, the Winner had been “a published monograph or essay collection about science fiction and/or fantasy or related themes” and that the other 13 years represented a variety of types of works, with art books being most common (5 Winners).

For the most recent decade of his scope (which fell entirely within the Related Work era omitting only the first year) he categorized the Finalists, identifying the topic for books and the format for other types of works. His assessment was that, during those years, only twice had the Winner been “a book about sf.”[8]

Whyte notes that he considers some Finalists to fit the official scope less well than others, singling out a musical album and suggesting that it aligns better to the awards for fictional works and comparing it to two other items that were collections of short fiction, one that was a Finalist in 2004 and one that was disqualified on the basis of being a work of fiction in 2002.[9] In discussing works whose content is of ambiguous relevance, Whyte confirms (as a multi-year Hugo administrator) that the default principle is “let the nominators decide” and how several of the nominees he would have considered marginal had precedent in previous Finalists of similar format. In contrast, two 2019 nominees (a Video Essay and a Convention Event) that had no format precedent were considered uncontroversially eligible by that year’s administrators.[10] Evidently there was more administrative concern of the nomination of an acceptance speech in 2020, with the opinion that the precedent established by an acceptance speech appearing as a Dramatic Presentation in 2012 should establish that as the appropriate award for such works. This approach was stymied by no one having nominated the 2020 speech under Dramatic Presentation.[11]

There is a longer discussion of the 2021 Finalists, with Whyte noting that 5 of the 6 generated eligibility discussions among the administrators, in all cases concluding that there was precedent and argument for considering them eligible. Switching hats from administrator to voter, Whyte then reiterates his opinion that “scholarly or biographical books or works about sf and fantasy” should win the award[12] while assessing his own choices.

The Hugo Award Study Committee 2022

In 2022, the results of the multi-year assessment by the Hugo Award Study Committee (led by Nicholas Whyte) were reported to the Business Meeting (see the Administrative History section under Subsequent Relevant Discussions) however this report operated at a high level and did not include details of nomination trends.

Doris V. Sutherland 2022

Other people have presented assessments of the award category in specific years—too many to track down in full. One example from Doris V. Sutherland (posted 2022/02/03) analyzing all the nomination data for Best Related in 2021[13] is of interest because it specifically addresses the question “just how much scholarly work is actually being nominated for Best Related Work?” Out of the 16 items in the Long List, Sutherland appears to assess 2 of the Finalists and 7 works overall as meeting the definition of “scholarly work” (possibly 2 short Essays should be added, making it 9 scholarly works). Sutherland is unabashedly partisan in asserting which works should not have been nominated, and assigning blame to certain works for “pushing” worthier items off the ballot and off the Long List. She compares the 9/16 scholarship rate to the 2010 published nominees, which she assesses as 22/23 scholarly works.[14] Her assessment concludes with a suggestion to split Best Related into Long Form and Short Form (as is done for Dramatic Presentation) to allow scholarly books more of a fighting chance.[15]

Summary

No doubt other people have done reviews of a particular year’s results, but no prior study has been identified that addressed the full history of Best Related and covered the Long List nomination data. Further, prior studies have generally emerged from a critique of how people thought the award category ought to be structured. The intent of the present study is to be descriptive and explanatory (to the extent possible) and to include all known nomination data, as well as to distinguish trends in format and content.

But these critiques, and other similar ones not quoted here, provide an interesting baseline for a “conservative” or “traditional” take on the appropriate scope of the category. (The term “traditional” will be used later in this study, to avoid political implications of the term “conservative.”) However, note that some types of “non-traditional” work were being nominated very early in the lifetime of the category. While the descriptions of traditional versus non-traditional content in these critiques don’t align exactly with the Categories used in this study, we can identify the following as falling in the traditional group: Art (at least when involving studies of artists and their work), Autobiography and Biography, Criticism and Essays (distinguished in this study based on whether the subject is a specific work or a general topic), History and Reference works (of SFF subjects). The traditional view also prefers Books over other formats, though it’s less clear whether the Article/Blog format is specifically dispreferred. In the analysis of Categories when grouped into Supercategories, the Associated group includes many of the types of subject matter that is called out as non-traditional.

(Segment II will cover Part 2 Methodology, Section 2.1 Administrative History.)