As instanced in our earlier advance notice for Worldcon 77 in Dublin, the finalists for the 2019 Hugo Awards and 1944 Retro Hugos are live on the Dublin 2019 – an Irish Worldcon website. It’s worth emphasizing that the closing date for votes, as given on the paper copy of the ballot form, is July 31st, 2019, so if you’re eligible as a voter, there is still time to make your vote count.

There’s a welcome flavour of diversity about this year’s finalists, and a welcome absence of any sign of the influence of ballot-stuffing campaigns by the likes of the Sad/Rabid Puppies of yesteryear. The only one of the finalists for Best Novel who isn’t a woman is of Korean descent, and one sure favourite in this category is Rebecca Roanhorse’s post-apocalyptic Navajo/Dinétah monster hunter saga Trail of Lightning. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti makes another welcome appearance in the Best Novella category, and Okorafor is also right there in the stakes for Best Graphic Story as co-writer of Black Panther: Long Live the King.

For those who are interested in the voting figures for the Hugo Awards, from 1971 right up to the latest snapshot of the Dublin 2019 voting, the figures are online here.  Judging by those figures, it looks like the 2019 Hugos will be supported by a very strong poll – not yet the same number of voters as Worldcon 77 in Helsinki, but there’s still time for catch-up.

So far there’s thankfully also no sign of the kind of controversies and slip-ups that dogged Worldcon 76 in San Jose. It’s to be hoped that Worldcon and the Hugos have now left those far behind.