More Than Half of This Year’s Hugo Awards Went to Women, and You Can Read Their Stuff for Free Online

We linked you to the results of the 2012 Hugo Awards for the best in science fiction and fantasy yesterday for the sake of timeliness, and we also brought you the story of Neil Gaiman‘s win for The Doctor’s Wife. But we had to go back and make a full post of it once we took a closer look and realized that more than half of the winners this year were worked on or solely created by women.

Then, in the process of writing this post, we discovered that the majority of those Hugo Awarded works are available for free online in some form. We’ve linked to all the ones we can.

If I may make a personal recommendation, it would be for Ursula Vernon‘s Digger, nominated for an Eisner in 2006, and now presumably eligible for the 2012 Hugos because of a physical compilation of the epic webcomic. While I, uh, dig Digger most for the ways it plays with gender, featuring cast of characters that lack visual gender characteristics (and in some cases are fully androgynous) and a fully fleshed out gender-role swapped society, it made it onto one of our power grids for a scene in which the main character has to ritualistically eat the liver of a fallen comrade. If you’re into dark mythological themes and dry wit, you will probably dig Digger too, and you can still read the whole comic online for free.

That said, here are the nine winning categories (out of sixteen) that went to women writers, editors, and artists this year:

• BEST NOVEL

Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)

• BEST NOVELLA

“The Man Who Bridged the Mist [link is to a .pdf file]” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, September/October 2011)

• BEST NOVELETTE

“Six Months, Three Days” by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com)

• BEST GRAPHIC STORY

Digger by Ursula Vernon (Sofawolf Press)

• BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM

Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.

• BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM

Betsy Wollheim, President and Publisher at DAW Books.

• BEST SEMIPROZINE

Locus, edited by Liza Groen Trombi (Editor-in-Chief), Kirsten Gong-Wong (Managing Editor), et al.

• BEST FAN ARTIST

Maurine Starkey (Deviant Art profile here.)

• BEST FANCAST

SF Squeecast, Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Paul Cornell, Elizabeth Bear, and Catherynne M. Valente

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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