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This year, Related Works has five nominees focused on one person or their body of work, and one nomination which is a speech that reflects back on Hugo / Worldcon fandom.
How does a voter aim for impartiality, giving all works a fair shot based on their own merits, when five have clear similarities and then there's the one outlier?

Well, this year, I'm going to vote with my feelings and biases.

I am voting Becoming Superman number one because I have been stanning for JMS since 1996. Whenever I hear about the latest scandal in SF/F circles, I wonder if this is going to be the day I learn something I didn't want to know about one of my teenage idols. So far it's not, and when that happens, I'm going to have to grapple with that. But here and today, I am giving the nod to the work which I started reading, thinkg, I'll just read a chapter or two so I can say I didn't vote just on rep, and looked up twelve chapters later.

Dethroning the person who created the best escape from the toughest, most miserable years of my teens is the default in this category. I wrote that before I opened Becoming Superman, and twelve chapters later, I actually find myself asking, "is this really how you honor that legacy?" Should I not give the nod to Ng, for pointing out the flaws in our community? Should it not go to Jones, for ensuring Russ continues to be part of the fabric of sf/f fandom? Should it not go to O'Meara, for reviving awareness of those women men actively don't see... but are essential to sf/f, or the Le Guin documentary team, for championing the legacy of one of our greats? What about Mendlesohn's smashing work on Heinlein? ("Do we need more words about Heinlein?" I can hear from the audience. When they're words like this, I say yes!)

In a year when I am looking and the novels and novellas with real questions about whether we've learned anything about single-author voting blocs, I am both disappointed the Related Works are not more diverse in media and depth, and glad to absorb the materials provided in the Hugo packet.

Jeanette Ng Campbell Acceptance Speech: The Hugo packet includes what I assume are the notes she wrote for her speech but I think watching a recording of the speech gives a much better understanding about what nominators might have been thinking. In 2'04", the video captures the emotions the speech displays: a stunned joy and a huge surge feeling about then-current events in Ng's home city of Hong Kong; scathing condemnation of fascism; and look! A hat! A wonderful hat that does a cool thing!

This captures a moment in Worldcon culture in two minutes and four seconds. Does it deserve a Hugo? I don't think it does! This year's Related Works nominees include efforts that were months or years in the making. To see those set aside for a wonderful, moving gig put together in less than five minutes feels off-center. But! It is an important historic moment.

I don't know that it is what I'd be thrilled to see getting the award nod, but if I ask myself, well, if Jo Walton were reviewing this year 20 years down the road, what would be the remarks? I think it would be a miss to give it the award and also a miss to leave it off the ballot. So there.

Joanna Russ (Gwyneth Paltrow): Super dry academic material on a great of the New Wave. I am split: how can I give Becoming Superman my vote, but turn around and say "this single-author academic work is too dry, too narrow-focused, to be the best thing that came out in 2019 related to the field of SF/F?" I can honestly question, how does this impact our understanding of the field? Does it preserve information that would be lost? Does it re-interpret what is known?

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, Mallory O’Meara: the excerpt, from the intro, is very flavored in pop culture, which is not bad, but makes me think the impact is more in the sum of works like this, rather than this work in particular. I asked, "does it preserve information that would be lost?" and yes, this one does. It's got a narrow focus again, which knocks it down my standings.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn: I didn't finish the excerpt, but it's academic and readable! There are disclaimers about evaluating the historic impact of Heinlein's work, rather than the literary quality, and I am very glad this distinction was made up front.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, Arwen Curry & etc: Another area where my bias is significant and evident. It's Le Guin, who is a formative influence! On the other hand, we've, um, given her a lot of accolades. But it's a pleasant documentary, and I would have no shame in pushing it on sundry friends and acquaintences.

cahn proposed the short fiction is all in the "X is Terrible" subgenre. I will attempt to summarize accordingly.

Alix E. Harrow, "Do Not Look Back, My Lion": Eefa is a healer in a society increasingly given to war. Talaan is her wife, the Lion of Xos, one of the great warriors of her people. Eefa doesn't see how she, a small woman with a small destiny, can change her people's conquering warlike ways. Talaan kills the warmongering Emperor and presumably dies in the attempt as Eefa walks away with their last child. War is terrible.

S. L. Huang, "As the Last I May Know": Two hundred years ago, "sere missiles" were used against Nyma's people. Now they have the technology, but the activation codes are stored in a carrier. To get the codes to use sere missiles, the elected leader has to kill the carrier, always a child, in this case Nyma. Cue several years of being the carrier while war closes in. Points for characters who not only have different opinions about the use of sere missiles, but whose opinions and feelings shift over the narrative. Nuclear missiles are terrible.

Shiv Ramdas, "And Now His Lordship is Laughing": British governor demands grandmother Apa make him a jute "doll" for his wife, then starves India and all Apa's village, so Apa makes him a Hatya’r Putul that kills everyone with laughter. Apa dies laughing. British rule of India is terrible.

Nebeda Sen, "Ten Excerpts from An Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island": Cannibalism is one of my hard "no" lines. So I have a hard time getting past the eating of human flesh on this one! With that said, if I'm reading the fragments correctly, it's about making someone part of you, with a side of scandalized Victorian sensibilities when a friend of a kidnapped Ratnabar young women Gets It and does this for her friend. And then a hundred years of scholarship happen, cue multiple waves of minority studies recapitulated with a woman-dominated cannibal society. I Got It, I think, but I also think this is a story of negative space, it's got lots of room for the reader to make things up. cahn thinks it needs more plot. I think it needs less eating of human flesh by other humans as a metaphor for relationships between women. Victorians are terrible. 

Rivers Solomon, "Blood is Another Word For Hunger": Sully kills the family that owns her, and her anger causes her to birth a dead slave ancestor for each death she commits. So she keeps going with killing.

"Before, Sully thought it was her lack of want for anything that made her feel so shapeless and void, but her relief at seeing Ziza upon her rebirth upended that notion. She wasn’t numb for lack of want but for wanting too much. She was ravenous for the whole world. . . Even as she imagined possessing all these things, she wanted yet more. It was strange, she thought, how limitless a void inside of a person could be. It was strange that a person could be killed, but not anything that that person had done."

Slavery is terrible. 

Fran Wilde, "A Catalog of Storms": Sila lives in a world where Weathermen fight deadly storms by shouting at them until they break, but ultimately become something not-human and lose connection with the people of Sila's village. Not sure what's terrible here, I was going for something post-apocalyptic, but weather doesn't work like this.

I have no opinion on which of these should win, except that the Sen had the craft skills that sort of worked for me. Likely my final rankings will be made by asking, "which one will I be least annoyed to see on the announcement of winners?"

I read the first chapter online, ordered it from the library, let it gather dust until the library return date was fast approaching, and then inhaled it in one night after finishing a work project.

I had seen divergent opinions on this novel. It's excellent. It's garbage.

Spoilers, it's both.

Gideon Nav, eighteen years old and desperate to escape the morbid Ninth House, finds herself shackled to its necromantic heir as the heir's cavalier in an event that brings together the best necromancers and cavaliers of the Houses.

In certain circles, there's a recurring conversation:
SPEAKER #1: Fiction is overrun with dudes. There's too many guys. We need more fiction with non-dudes.
SPEAKER #2: Be the change you want to see in the world!
*crickets*
THREE MONTHS LATER
SPEAKER #1: Fiction is overrun with dudes. There's too many guys.

Gideon the Ninth is what happens when Speaker #1 actually writes something with non-dudes, and goes to the effort of getting it published. Yay!

It is also pure tumblr shirt-posting. (Yes, The Good Place has gotten to me. So much.) It is a work that emerges from the heart, from not only "fiction is overrun with dudes" but also "you know what we need? LOYALTY KINK. And GORMENGHAST. Plus swordfights. And skeletons, lots of inexplicable skeletons. And ENEMIES who become SWORN ALLIES, only AWESOMER."

This is hinted at in the physical hardcover from the moment one picks it up. The cover art depicts Gideon in oversized sunglasses, traditional skeletal facepaint, "I'll stop wearing black when they make a darker color" short sleeves and spiffy tight trousers, swinging a rapier amidst skeletons collapsing with expressions of pain. This is not considered sufficient hinting! No, the novel is edge-painted in black, the chapter decals are black skulls, the houses have different skull designs... this is a novel with Serious Mood.

The author put a thanks to ffn reviewers in her afterword, so I feel no compunctions echoing rumors she passed through Homestuck fandom. Which explains why Gideon and Harrowhark have a relationship that maps roughly onto *googles* kismesis, or "can't live with you, can't live without our mutual loathing."

There are good reasons Gideon and Harrowhark have a complicated relationship. This backstory comes to light during the novel. It's compelling as a story about relationships, and feelings, though whether the logic holds up, well...

The worldbuilding as developed so far is utter garbage, an afterthought to the "like this premise, but AWESOMER" storytelling. Several days after my transcendent one-night stand, I find myself asking irritating little questions, like "how does a necromantic empire function, anyway?" and "will other necromancers detect Harrow's [major spoiler]?" Not to mention the psychodynamic implications of "one flesh, one end", which likely will be tossed aside in favor of [speculative spoilers] down the road.

There's also a mystery genre element to the novel, which is not resolved to my satisfaction. It's not enough to declare that Murder Is Crazy, That's Why They Murdered. It would be nice to get a little villainous expositing about why they murdered who they killed, and why they picked the methods that they picked; or some characters pointing out that Murder A lines up with Psychological Fault-Line A'. I'm picky that way.

The big honking unresolved question is Gideon's origins. Right now, I would put my money down on some variation of Lyctor-Affiliated Spirit A shoved into Body B, which would spackle some of the worldbuilding inconsistencies from Chapter 1 on.

Recommended for a time and place in which one prefers to turn off one's brain. Pre-conditioning one's brain with your tumblr feed immediately before opening the novel is strongly recommended.