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Notes -
I'd be interested in just a variant of this awards convention that isn't crap.
You can do really interesting things with an aimless and actless protagonist -- historically, Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine, but my favorite example is the excellent Kino's Journey series. Chambers flubs not because the Wayfarers series lacks a goal, but for the same reasons the (much less conventionally woke and much more conventionally 'plotted') The Wrong Stars does: there's just not enough tension. Not that it needs to be high-stakes: both stories are, in the same way that Dragon Ball Z is high-stakes. But they have less actual conflict between what characters want and what they're doing than a Sesame Street episode, fewer drawing questions than Haibane Renmai or the average litRPG.
"Bots of the Lost Ark" is stronger in that there's at least something there -- you don't know why any of this is happening or who these people are, and you kinda want to -- but the characters aren't coherent enough to feel like it's important or urgent rather than author fiat. The best I can say about "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" is that it's interestingly experimental and has a clever 'twist'? But in addition to the experiment sucking, the format just doesn't drive you to care about the gotcha until you're almost three-quarters of the way through, and the best it does for theme is a self-referential 'oh, but maybe themes are mixed' footnote.
Never Say You Can't Survive is... not science-fiction or fantasy, or even really fiction. It's half how-to-write, half self-help book. Which isn't the worst example of unrelated junk that's been put forward for Best Related Work, with some of this year's pieces edging on the onanistic. That's not just a matter of philosophical or political disagreement: “How Twitter can ruin a life” is closer to my views, but it's still very much a writing-about-a-real-world-news-about-sci-fi-writing thing rather than actually Related. But still a long-standing problem. And while I'm not the target audience for podcasts, this doesn't really impress.
But you could do some really fascinating stuff with these pieces, and with the exception of Never Say, it'd be a editing change, rather than a deep change of scope or theme. It just doesn't seem important, any more, in the same way that Tor's not really an editing service to the limited extent it once was.
((There are some Hugo Awards that were serviceable or even good. I don't think I'd have voted for Desolation Called Peace, but it's pretty enjoyable a read. I'd rather Fan Writer go to media writers rather than infrastructure ones, but the WorldCon voters as a whole have long-favored infrastructure and Buhlert has more than paid her dues on that matter. Dune both goes without saying and isn't another godsdamned Doctor Who episode. Lee Moyer is an amazing artist in general, and the small gods project showed that off a lot even if the actual works were incredibly shallow. I've got mixed feelings on Jemesin's writing for the same reasons I don't like Bojack Horseman, but I've heard Far Sector's not bad for a Green Lantern series.))
I'm also generally unhappy about the repeats. A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace aren't awful, as much as the latter had a little too much overlap in one of its twists with Ender's Game. But especially good competition like Project Hail Mary or Black Water Sister, it feels at best like it's a symptom of block voting for the same authors to repeat.
Is it not? I heard similar sentiment from someone whom I respect, and I started reading it without prejudice (I don’t follow who wins Hugo anymore, so I didn’t know who the author is). Wow was I disappointed. Constant mulling on the protagonist’s emotional state really made me queasy, but when the main character casually shared the most important secret of her culture to some freshly, randomly met guys, it was too stupid to continue.
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