INTRODUCTION: This piece is cross-posted on my blog as well as File 770; thanks to Mike Glyer for offering to host it there. The title is a humorous reference to British YouTuber hbomberguy’s very long ‘Measured Response’ video essays on various hot-button topics. As you’ll see, it is not very short at all. Oops!

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By Kat Kourbeti: Once again we’re talking about long lists of names on the Hugo ballot, folks, and I cannot stress how tired I am even as I start to type this post. I am tired of having to defend my magazine’s decision to list our entire team of 85 people on the 2021 ballot, or other magazines’ decision to follow suit, or people having their names pronounced correctly (or even at all!) during the Hugo ceremony… I am exhausted, frankly, from constantly having to ask for us all to be treated with basic dignity.

If you are tired of all this too, I can only apologise for adding more reading to your plate, no matter what your position is on the matter. You may skip to the bottom for my TL;DR recommendations to fix this mess, but I will go ahead and lay out my full thoughts because:

1. I’ve never put this in writing before and given (as near as I can tell) no one with my vantage point has, I think it’s worth doing.
2. I think it’s important to hear from someone outside the SMOF-sphere on Hugo-related matters every once in a while. This is also the very reason I’ve gotten involved with Business Meetings in the first place, going from simply listening/speaking and voting to drafting motions to co-chairing committees on BM Reform. The main thing I bring to those discussions is my non-SMOF, creator-first perspective, which is seldom heard in these spaces.

(Speaking of—please do come to the virtual Business Meetings this year, if not to vote on this issue, then definitely to hear the outcome of the Trial Committee’s work, which I served on over the last year and wrote the 28,000-word report on. As expected, it’s a doozy!)

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Some disclaimers/caveats before I begin:

• As one of the many members of the team that kickstarted this whole debate five years ago, I am not a neutral party. I am, to a degree, arguing on this from a selfish perspective, having been recognised by name only once as a finalist in the Semiprozine category, and embroiled in this conversation for years.

• While I do generally represent Strange Horizons as a member of our Editorial Collective, the opinions in this piece are entirely my own.
  • I have reached out to editors from SH as well as several other markets to ensure I am not misrepresenting anything in the broader conversation, and any comments they gave me have been attributed clearly.

• Out of immense respect for the folks on the co-signed list—many of whom I personally regard as the voices of reason on most WSFS-related topics, and trust their opinions on Worldcon and Hugo-related matters almost blindly—I will go ahead and assume no malice or personal “beef” is involved here against any particular person or venue, but rather a clumsy and tactless attempt to bring consistency and stability to resolve a contested and tricky issue.

I’ll also assume that there was no intention to hurt anyone’s feelings, despite the inflammatory language used in the discussion portion. There may well be a fundamental disagreement on how we view things—we’ll get to why I think this in a little bit.

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This piece is a response to Tammy Coxen’s piece Role Creep in the Hugo Awards Semiprozine Category, published on June 30th on File 770, but also a response to the situation at large, which has been building for the last five years, and culminated in this year’s motion to limit finalist teams to 8 people (see F7/page 48 of the 2026 BM agenda). Olav Rokne, listed first in the signatories of the motion we’re about to discuss, wrote a piece titled The Numbers Game on the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog back in 2023, and he linked it in his recent Bluesky post announcing this motion to the public—so clearly, this has been on people’s minds for a minute.

At the heart of this issue is what I would call a fundamental disconnect between creators and non-creators, which tends to surface in ugly ways whenever constitutional amendments are proposed without any input from affected parties. It happened with the Fancast proposal in 2023-24 that would have precluded basically all podcasts and YouTube channels from being eligible for the award (see E9/page 53 in the 2024 BM minutes); it’s happening again with the fan/pro art argument which squeaked by last year (see F22/page 125 in the 2025 BM minutes), and of course the motion before us right now, which would affect primarily the Fanzine, Semiprozine, Fancast, and Best Related Work categories.

For the most part, I think there are good intentions behind each proposal, but also a genuine misunderstanding of the creative landscape and the ways in which it is shifting, both within and outside the SFF community. I will do my best to outline where I think those gaps are, and what my suggestions are for solving this by taking both sides of the argument into account and trying to reach a compromise, in a sincere attempt to end this bad-faith back-and-forth; I think we can all agree that when either side assumes the other has it out for them, things get nasty and feelings get hurt, and the vicious cycle becomes more likely to continue spinning.

So… why list everyone anyway?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the proponents of this proposal have asked anyone from these large teams why they have felt compelled to list their entire masthead, or the majority of it—at least not in good faith; I’ve seen questions directed at no one in particular in SMOF spaces and the comments of File 770 over the years, but no answer was ever expected and if one was received it was met with derision. I understand these spaces are frequented by long-time fans and con-runners who have expectations for things to remain as they have for decades, because as far as they can tell it’s worked pretty well thus far, so why should we ask to change things to such a ludicrous degree?

I am uniquely positioned to answer this, and I will start with the elephant in the proverbial room:

When Strange Horizons sent a list of 85 names to the Hugo administrators in 2021, we did so because we’d just undergone a paradigm shift at the magazine, and would soon no longer operate under the usual editorial structure whereby staff answer to an Editor-in-Chief at the top. To start with, most of us had ‘editor’ in our titles anyway—I joined in 2020 as a Podcast Editor, for example, not a Producer—signifying that we were all in charge of the content our departments put out. However, that year would see us move on from our last EIC, Ness Phin, whose decision to list us all on the Hugo ballot paved the way for the person who took over their position, Gautam Bhatia, to completely reconsider our editorial structure.

Bhatia did not see his position as inherently more important or more senior to the rest of us. Thus, drawing inspiration from our now-infamous “flat, anarchic structure”, each department’s independence was further reinforced, and as Bhatia named his role ‘Coordinating Editor’, alongside Romie Stott who is our ‘Administrative Editor’, we transitioned away from the EIC model. To this day, no one at SH is meant to be ‘above’ anyone else—hence, the “editorial collective” was born. When the Hugo administrators reached out to let us know we had been nominated, Ness and then Bhatia wanted us all to be equitably recognised for our efforts, not just themselves and a couple of other people.

To further illustrate this, I need only point you to our current home page to get a sense of everything we do: we don’t just publish fiction; our issues include poetry, essays, reviews, art, and podcasts, roughly 47 weeks out of the year; we take one week off around the end of December, and 4 of our quarterly issues are in fact published by Samovar, our sister magazine of translated SFF stories. Basically there is a constant output of new stories, poems, non-fiction, and audio, week in and week out, and this model takes so much work to keep up with that we have a team of 80+ people volunteering for all the different departments. As we said in our Hugo acceptance speech in 2024 (part of which I helped write):

We are the largest group of people to be nominated for a Hugo award – and now, to have won it – and that’s because we believe that everyone’s work is equally crucial to making a magazine like this happen. From our incredible team of first readers, to the fiction and poetry editors, to the podcast team, to our review editors and the guest editors of our special issues, it took a village of nearly 100 volunteers to raise this baby.

(Of course, by that point in 2024 we had walked back our stance and just listed the Editorial Collective as a blanket term, due to both being essentially bullied by the nasty reactions in fandom spaces, and due to the Chengdu Hugo Administrators asking us to limit our names to just 7, which we refused to do… but I digress.)

To us, it seemed imperative to recognise everyone who had helped make the magazine. In 2021, I was included in this, and it was the first time I received a finalist certificate with my name on it. This also meant that there are records kept of my name as a Hugo finalist on the Awards’ website, the SFADB, Locus Magazine, John Scalzi’s blog, and wherever else the finalists were announced. This is incontrovertible, searchable proof that I—and everyone else on that list—was on the team that year. It means that I can say with reasonable confidence that I am the first Greek national to have received a Hugo nomination, which is mindblowing and really emotionally significant to me. On the team that year we also had folks from Brazil, Singapore, Colombia, and Sri Lanka—more countries that had never been represented on a Hugo ballot before.

This is why we did this. We wanted to preserve the record, and we wanted to make it known that to make something like this every single week, it takes the free labour of 80+ people from all over the world, and a whole lot of dedication and love—that only naming a couple of editors (or 4, or 7, or 8) at the perceived “top” doesn’t fully reflect the truth. As more and more Semiprozines, Fanzines, and some Best Related Work nominees decided to follow our example and list more of (or sometimes their entire) staff regardless of their editorial structure, the diversity of the Hugo Awards has visibly increased, highlighting that the SFF community is only getting more globally diverse by the year, which (in my view at least) is absolutely a good thing.

I thought this indicated a broad agreement from other finalists, but as I didn’t want to speak out of turn, I reached out to folks at khōréō, Escape Artists, as well as one of the r/Fantasy moderators to get their takes on this, as all of their teams have been impacted in ways both positive and negative through the events of last few years; all indicated agreement with my sentiments above. Zhui Ning Chang of khōréō added (emphasis mine):

The point about having a traceable record for the Hugos is so important—both because of the Hugos’ lineage in SFF fandom and how it is becoming more diverse, as you pointed out, and because that name recognition is almost always the only tangible community acknowledgment they might receive for the countless hours of volunteer work.

This touches upon something I’ll get to much later, which is the name recognition and perceived “dilution” of the value of the award if it is attached to that many more names; I have a lot of thoughts about that in particular, but here I have to agree with Chang wholeheartedly.

Now, I’m about to get into the “logistics problem” in a second, but to be absolutely and abundantly clear right now, none of these teams ever expected free memberships (or paid flights or accommodation), or infinite free trophies upon winning, or infinite spaces at any Hugo party, official or otherwise. Ask anyone on any of these teams and you’ll get the same answer, and that I can absolutely promise you. When offered by a Worldcon, of course we’ll accept whatever we are able to receive; but at no point does it mean that because we listed 80 people, we expect everyone to get [insert thing here]. But more on this in the next section.

Anyway, all this to say that it would have been great if the writers of this motion had consulted some of the large teams in question to get their perspective, because we would have told them this at any point if they’d cared to ask; I don’t think there is an excuse for not including affected parties in conversations about decisions that will directly impact them—and no: having Olav Rokne on their team, who was excluded from the ballot as a guest editor of Journey Planet in 2023, does not sufficiently count as “seeking the perspective of affected parties” in my opinion, as he was (a) just one person, (b) already on the ballot with his own fanzine that year, and (c) already a well-known and respected fanzine editor for many years before this.

I consider not seeking a broader sample of feedback a massive faux-pas that reflects the divide between con-runners, SMOFs, and the creators whose work is honoured by the community every year, especially in the categories that are uniquely fannish and/or niche to the SFF community (such as Fanzine, Semiprozine, and Best Related Work). Given the integrity of the people on this list, I absolutely expected better of all of them.

The hypothetical logistics problem

The common argument that keeps coming back in SMOF/con-runner circles especially, and which Coxen repeats in Role Creep, is that Worldcons cannot afford to wine and dine this many people, or provide that many pins and certificates and trophies, should a large team win their category. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually obvious and understandable to everyone, and I don’t think any one of us had assumed in the past (or would assume now) that there are infinite resources for free memberships, trophies, parties, etcetera.

Since 2021, there has been conversation around what Worldcons can or should do for finalists, especially when they come from marginalised backgrounds—things like making sure they have access to the con (or at least for the Hugo ceremony), if they are able to attend it, or that they are accepted onto programme items if they apply—but that is widely understood to be commensurate with the capabilities of each Worldcon, especially where it comes to financial constraints. After all, Worldcons too are volunteer run, and the budget is only as big as the pool we can all collectively gather through memberships and donations. No one understands this better than the volunteer staff of these venues, who have to make their own sacrifices in money, time, or both in order to make their work possible—trust me on that.

Every year, we have continued to have those conversations and make adjustments as we learn and grow from the previous years’ experiences, but I still don’t think that Hugo finalists are demanding infinite freebies. Actually, as most of what I’ve seen elseweb has little to do with the Hugos and their administration and more to do with programming and general accessibility, I will not be dwelling on it in this post. If people still want to hear my thoughts on it, I can do a write-up on that another time.

The biggest sticking point for the motion writers, it seems, is that because the WSFS Constitution does not specify a limit to team sizes, it makes administering the awards (and ensuring everyone gets what they’re entitled to) an inconsistent affair. That’s actually a fair and valid point, so here I’m going to break down the various elements of this concern, and attempt to solve for both the Hugo admins and the potential finalists.

• First off, Hugo trophies have generally been limited to three per group finalist, with the option to pay for extra trophies to be manufactured and shipped to the relevant parties after the convention is over. While that is unofficial, it is my understanding that it has been standard practice for several years now, and it is completely understandable given the cost of labour and materials for even a single trophy (in 2024, we were quoted £175 per trophy when we ordered our extra ones for SH, which of course we were happy to pay). As far as I am aware, no one from any large team has ever complained about this.
• Finalist pins and certificates are technically not limited, and each finalist is technically entitled to one of each; usually they get them in their packets as they arrive at the convention, or in the mail if they are not attending.
  • Actually this has not really happened for large teams in recent years (in fact, a moderator from r/Fantasy told me “most of our team did not get finalist certificates in our nominee packets and when I inquired, [they said] “we couldn’t bring enough certificates to the con for everyone,” which the r/Fantasy team did not contest)—and to my understanding there hasn’t been any kickback in general about it except for 2023 (though as we all well know, the pins/certificates were the least serious problem that year).
• In theory, invitations to the Hugos pre-party and the ceremony itself are not limited either, though in practice I believe each Worldcon has negotiated a limited number of places at each, with optional plus one invites for people’s partners and so on. This is one of the main arguments around logistics I keep hearing from SMOFs who are concerned about stretching Worldcon budgets beyond what is feasible.

While in principle this may appear to be a valid concern, I would argue that in reality it is completely unfounded, and a lot of the reasons why come down to income, class, and other marginalisations that the people in these large teams have to contend with. I don’t think this has ever entered the consciousness of the motion writers (or the SMOFs and long-time fans who argue this in the comments of File 770), and that says more about their thinking (and their privilege) than they realise.

What do I mean?

Let’s use Strange Horizons again as an example. Despite listing our entire 85-strong team in 2021, the most people we have been able to gather at a Worldcon at a time has been a fraction of that: 3 people in 2022, 6 in 2024 (actually 5 by the time of the Hugos, as I personally had to leave due to contracting COVID), and 4 in 2025. This year, I believe it’s going to be one person attending IRL, and about 4 of us virtually, last I checked. So, there has never been a throng of 80-odd people collectively threatening to descend to the pre-Hugo party and demand to be fed and watered, or expecting 160 seats at the Hugo ceremony and one trophy each upon winning, and I can promise you there never will be.

Why? To put it bluntly, it’s because we’re poor, both in time and money. We are scattered across the globe, and many of us are working class and earn such low wages that we can’t afford international travel, let alone accommodation and expenses for a convention of that size, every single year; for some, even taking the time off work is impossible. Especially right now, with flight costs skyrocketing due to the ongoing fuel crisis, attending international conventions in person is becoming increasingly prohibitive for many of us. On the whole, we’re happy doing the work, day in day out, so the magazine can keep ticking; anything else is a bonus, and awards nominations are the biggest boon of all, as they tell us that the community is enjoying our work. That is something we can celebrate wherever we are in the world.

The blunt reality is that to take advantage of these technicalities, one would have to be able to get to Worldcon in the first place, and even with the odd bursary (which I have very gratefully received in the past myself, and I know I have Tammy Coxen to thank for the scheme even existing in the first place), the truth is that most of the volunteers who work on these projects simply don’t get to go to Worldcon at all. So this fear of giant teams coming for Worldcon’s budget is just unrealistic, based on nothing in particular, and kind of serves as a smokescreen that distracts from what I really think is going on behind this motion.

The bigger question: do large teams “dilute” the value of the award?

Here we enter the part where I think there is a diametrically opposed view of the issue between Coxen et al and myself (and whoever agrees with me). This may breach the philosophical, but if you’re still reading I ask that you bear with me, as it is the crux of why I feel so incensed and offended that I wrote a [checks word count] 6,000+ word response to this.

The motion discussion mentions that a greater number of finalists/winners dilutes the significance of being a finalist/winner, and subsequently the perceived value of the award itself. That by there being more of us out there, it makes being a Hugo Award finalist or winner less special somehow.

I really wish I didn’t have to explain why this sounds elitist, classist, and actually dehumanising to those of us who are members of large teams, but it looks like I do, because despite arguing about this in several places online over the last week, the proponents of this motion and their supporters don’t seem to quite get it.

Awards value/prestige as a finite resource, and comparisons with other awards, eg. the Oscars

First of all, I believe it is essential to clarify that the perceived value of a Hugo Award (or indeed any award at all) is not a finite resource. It is not, to borrow the words of someone on Bluesky, “a pie” which we diminish by cutting small slices off for ourselves and away from other categories. It does not run parallel to the stock market, where the value of a stock diminishes as more shareholders purchase shares of a company. There is no supply & demand inflating or deflating an award’s importance depending on if there are large teams on the ballot or not. The shift in certain categories of teams listing more roles, or in some cases their entire staff, is simply reflective of a shift in the landscape of zines and group projects, a mindset change where the folks making these things deem it important to recognise the contributions of their team in ways that may be new to us.

Also, crucially, the existence of large teams on the ballot does not mean more awards are given out upon a win. The categories remain the same, and only one award is given out per category, making an individual category no different than one shared amongst a team. Individuals within teams might be Hugo Award winners, but they are still sharing that as part of a collective—I don’t tell people that I have won a Hugo Award, for example, because I haven’t; I am a Hugo Award winning editor at Strange Horizons. The award was won by SH, and I was on the team when we won, so I’m sharing that honour, but it is not exclusively mine. That to me is obvious, and I really don’t see the point of arguing that more names on a list, or even more trophies out in the world, somehow takes away from the achievements of, say, short story writers or novelists who win in their respective categories. It’s apples and oranges, frankly, and by winning a slice of an apple I am not taking away anybody’s orange. That’s been the case for as long as the Hugo Awards have existed.

Secondly, the value of any award lies in its perception by outsiders. It is something that takes a long time to cultivate, and often lies outside of the administering body’s power to control. When the Hugos were first conceived, they were so insular and niche that the only people that knew of them and cared about them where the people in these very halls, so to speak. In the decades since, they have gained fame outside of our circles and become a defacto stamp of approval on works of art, people who publish or help make these works, and fannish and volunteer efforts that celebrate and elevate the speculative genres, but they are still pretty insular and niche. People like me have entered this community because we’d heard of the Hugos in our little corners of the Earth (I still can’t believe I get to be here and vote in the Hugos! it blows my little Greek mind to think about it), so I can’t dispute that there is prestige here, to be sure—but I am a science fiction nerd, like all of you, not some rando off the street who only knows of people if they are TV famous. Yes, the Hugos may have grown, but they are still decidedly a community-driven award, despite their more widespread fame.

Case in point: several times this week, while having conversations with colleagues and friends in person with people outside of this community in London, England where I reside, I’ve had to preface my discussion of this topic with the question “do you know what the Hugo Awards are?” and then explain their history and significance before I could even get into what I’ve been working on all week—this very post. Even while talking to people who read SFF books, it turns out not everyone knows about the Hugos at all, let alone cares about if something is Hugo-nominated or Hugo-winning—and I work in the arts, in the UK’s capital city, where there is a higher proportion of people who enjoy SFF books and media and might know what the Hugos are. Outside of the arts, and outside of cities where SFF fans can cluster together, that percentage probably falls drastically.

Jake ‘Casella’ Brookins of the Ancillary Review of Books compared the Hugo Awards to the Oscars on social media, a notion with which I disagree vehemently. The Hugos carry a certain caché, yes—but Academy Awards they are not. As I just mentioned, while there is definitely attention on the Hugos each year (and recent scandals have even brought negative mainstream media coverage of them), the Hugos have not been linked to massive sales bumps for shortlisted or winning works, as mainstream reading audiences are not paying attention to that degree. This is entirely the opposite to the Oscars, where even a nomination can guarantee a huge bump in ticket or VOD sales for a film, and actors are guaranteed higher profile projects and massive salary bumps following a nomination or a win.

In some ways, the two are not dissimilar: the Hugos are voted on by the SFF community and the people honoured in them are more often than not a part of this community, just as the Oscars are voted on by members of the AMPAS and the nominees are often (but not always) members of the Academy themselves. Yet, that’s where the similarities end, as the extent of public attention to and engagement with the Oscars is astronomically higher than any engagement with the Hugos outside of fandom spaces. When was the last time a non-fandom person engaged in Hugo predictions on social media every year? What about bets among friends or at a betting shop down a small UK town’s high street? Who throws Hugo watch parties till 5am in someone’s flat in continental Europe?

Brookins perhaps overinflated the prestige of the Hugos to make a point, and did not mean this literally; however, I would humbly ask for the courtesy of backing up one’s arguments with stone cold facts if they are going to bring these points up in order to substantiate being exclusionary on main.

Collectivism vs individualism

A part of the motion writers’ argument is that in 1976 the allowed list size was expanded in order to let all six Monty Pythons be nominated for 1975’s Holy Grail; this is intended to highlight inconsistency with team sizes, but what it tells me is that it’s fine if it’s famous creators outside the community who push for an expansion in team sizes, but not if it’s collectives made up of folks no one has heard of. Yes, six is far fewer than 85, but it sure sounds to me like if a Graphic Story or Dramatic Presentation finalist wanted to credit a longer list of people, it would somehow be less of a big deal for the administrators then, as it certainly has been historically. Funny that.

I can’t help but interpret this argument as a view of the individual’s achievement as more important and valid than a collective’s achievement, which truly rubs me the wrong way, maybe because I am part of a collective and I think in a more collective-forward way generally, in my life. I am a trade union rep within my day job, and truly think that people can achieve more and have more job satisfaction when working alongside others rather than alone.

Of course, the motion does not seek to limit team sizes in general, only who gets award recognition—but here’s the problem with that: making a team choose who amongst them gets to be nominated places a huge emotional burden on them, and would force teams to either adopt structures that would serve this model, or to leave out vital team members from getting their due credit in order to at least get some of them recognition for their work. It says “good job, some of you”, not “good job, all of you”. It’s exclusion 101, using language not at all dissimilar to present day anti-immigration policies prevalent both where I live and where Worldcon first started/is usually hosted, and it’s absolutely dehumanising to those excluded, especially when they are people of colour, hailing from outside the Anglosphere, or otherwise marginalised—as is often the case.

Here’s what having large teams on the ballot tells me personally:

1. The SFF community is more diverse than I could ever have imagined. A teenager in Bulgaria or Argentina or Korea could be looking at these lists of people and imagine being amongst them someday, and even start thinking about ways to get involved; maybe they join one of these teams, maybe they start their own thing—either way, it serves to grow the community and its diversity of voices.
2. The Hugo voter base likes this diversity, as they seem to enjoy these zines and related works that feature such broad spectra of people.
3. These people deserve my attention and curiosity. What do they do in their respective roles? What other work do they put out? I actually like to look up every single person listed on a zine team and check out their personal work, follow them on social media, and take an interest in their writing or other pursuits; this is how I discovered people like Nicasio Reed, Somto Ihezue, and Tonya R. Moore, all of whom started off as zine volunteers and are among the next generation of writing and editing talents to watch for. But that’s a me thing: I see a big list more like an opportunity for discovering something or someone new and interesting, rather than a bother.

So… what should we do here?

I’ve mentioned at the top of this that I think this motion (and particularly its associated discussion) is a tactless way to deal with the inconsistency that has plagued Hugo Administrators in the last five years. So how would I go about fixing this while taking into account both sides and their respective grievances?

To be quite honest, I think it should be withdrawn from consideration, as it is not fit for purpose and only serves to disrespect the people creating work in today’s landscape—work which the Hugo voters deem worthy of inclusion on their nominating ballots. Per Coxen’s responses on social media, the Constitution is not the appropriate place to specify limitations on trophies, pins/certificates, party/ceremony invitations, or ceremony procedures, all of which allegedly make the historical inconsistencies unbearable for administrators. If the only way to ensure consistency is to limit list numbers at the Constitution level, and put the onus on the teams themselves to decide who amongst them gets to be nominated and who doesn’t, then I don’t believe it is worth even discussing this motion to try and salvage any part of it.

If any of my reasoning has reached the people behind it, or folks who are likely to come to the virtual Business Meetings, I urge you to move to postpone this motion indefinitely, or object to its consideration before any debate takes place.

Practical recommendations on how to deal with large teams on the ballot

Truthfully, it costs nothing to put a list of names on the Hugo Awards website, the ballot, or the slides at the ceremony. It makes some people in the audience groan, sure, but—with all due respect here—the people who groan don’t understand or particularly care about what it means for these far-flung volunteer teams to be recognised for their work, or indeed how much they worked or sacrificed to make any of it possible. What they do care about is not having to sit there for ages and listen to long lists of names of people they know nothing about, which on a surface level I understand, even if I personally find it inconsiderate and devoid of curiosity about the people behind the works, venues, and zines they claim to be enjoying.

Still, I’ll take that into account as I lay out my recommendations below, as it is not my (or any large team’s) intention to punish people by making the ceremony three times as long as it needs to be. Besides, we’re all here because we love science fiction, and I still believe that what we have in common is stronger than the lines that divide us.

So my proposed solution is this:

• List the names as they are given by each team on places like the website, press releases, etc; this is about giving Hugo finalists the respect they deserve, and part of that is respecting how they want their teams to be listed. Think of it as respecting someone’s pronouns, which we tend to be very good about in the SFF community. If a team asks to be listed a certain way, with titles/roles which you might recognise, or some you don’t, or with no titles/roles at all, just do it—it’s not hard or expensive in itself.
• Don’t read any of them out loud at the ceremony; we sure would like to hear our names, but I understand that time constraints (and crucially, worries about mispronunciations) can really complicate things, so a compromise here would be to forego the reading altogether, but still have a slide with the list as it was given, held up for a few seconds so the audience can briefly applaud the finalist teams.
• Limit finalist pins to 8 per team (if they are attending in person), and make individual certificates digital/print-on-demand; as with the trophies, this would not be specified in the WSFS constitution, but if it becomes standard practice, then it will be less inconsistent for each successive Worldcon, and group finalists can know what to expect.
  • POD certificates will also not incur printing and distribution costs, and are easy to customise and far cheaper to send digitally for finalists to print at home. Several Worldcons have even made their main publications POD/digital in recent years, and—bar a small number of loud complaints—this has been received fairly well by the community.
• Limit Hugo party and ceremony invites to 8 per team; this could be left up to each Worldcon to amend according to their budget/venue restrictions, but a standard practice of 8 per team can help create a baseline to work from. If deviations from this norm are communicated clearly, it can help foster a climate of trust between Worldcons and finalists, and prevent resentment and controversy.
• continue the standard practice of limiting trophies to 3 per team; additional trophies can then be purchased if required, as is common now.

I expect the Hugo administrators within the motion writers can illuminate us as to how copy-pasting a list of names might complicate their work beyond what I have outlined above, but in my opinion I think this would strike a balance between recognising creators within the community in the way they are asking to be, while also respecting the limitations of space, finances, time, and labour that Worldcons have to deal with.

Thank you for reading and hearing me out with an open mind, and I hope we can resolve this issue and move past it in time.