the speech I gave at the 2020 Hugo Awards

A Memory Called Empire won the Hugo for Best Novel last night.

I am still a little floored, and overwhelmed, and very profoundly honored. (It’s my first novel. I genuinely was content with the achievement of being nominated.) It was a very deep ballot and to win from that selection of books and authors was just — thank you all, really, I can’t say it enough.

I want to post the acceptance speech I gave last night, for two reasons. One, to preserve the gratitude I very genuinely feel, and the moment in which I felt it — and two, to preserve what I felt needed to be said at the close of a ceremony which was not what any of the nominees deserved, and which felt irreparably bifurcated between the work and writers of SFF today who were being rightfully celebrated and a poison sort of nostalgia which seemed to have nothing to do with us, our work, or this field right now.

Here’s the text. And thank you all again.

Thank you all so very, very much. This is rather overwhelming – as you might expect – but I am going to do my best to tell you how grateful I am for your choice in giving this book the 2020 Best Novel Hugo.

It’s an especially sharp honor to receive this award for my first novel – it is a kind of welcome. An invitation to stay. A gesture of hospitality from all of you. A gesture that I deeply appreciate and which I wish so very profoundly was more easily extended to the authors, artists, editors, and fans of color who deserve as much hospitality as I do. A Memory Called Empire is in some ways a book about the inhospitability of so much of the universe: the inhospitability of culture, of origins, of desire. The pull of exile and the counterpull of dominance. The empire and its edges; the knife that hurts more because you’d loved it before it cut you.

I think a great deal about what it means to be welcome in a place. I wrote a book which considers whether someone ever can truly be made welcome. In this current world – where we are isolated by illness and by political corruption, where I have listened all night to the tension between an idealized simpler past and a complex, difficult, and brilliant present – where all the lines of exile and longing for familiarity are drawn ever-tighter and more painful – I’m still not sure about the answer to that question. In my book I let Mahit Dzmare have a version of the answer: for her, to be welcomed into the heart of empire is to lose the ability to truly go home inside her own mind. For me that’s actually a hopeful answer, for me – a person who cannot stop writing about exile, and about desire – who is an American, and a Jew, and a climate activist, and a historian, and who keeps falling in love with things bigger than her head, however unwisely. It is a hopeful answer to know that there is not a solution. Not a good one.

But right here and right now I feel like I might summon up a different sort of answer for myself, about welcome. In this corner of the universe that I share with you all – virtually, at the moment, but also cross-temporally, stretched from the time when I first read science fiction as a child and thought, oh, I wish I could talk to the writer who made this, and ask them how, and why, and whether I’ve noticed the right things about it – from there all the way to now, and from now for the rest of my life going forward. Here, I have been made welcome. Thank you for inviting me in. Thank you for seeing the work I am trying to do, the sort of stories I am trying to tell. What doors I can hold open and what belaying ropes I can send back down I will.

I want to thank my father, who gave me science fiction when I was far too small to know better – we called it science affliction and I am gladly afflicted at the moment – my mother, who had the temerity to ask me if I was quitting academia to be a writer (she was right, and I denied it when she asked me) – my magnificent agent, DongWon Song, and my brilliant editor, Devi Pillai, who combined to make me write all the parts of this book that should have been there all along – and always and most importantly, my wife Viv: all the stories are for you. You hang the stars and I couldn’t do this without you. 

Thank you all again so much.