Watchmen, Endgame and The Mandalorian among Hugo Award finalists; George R.R. Martin to host

Narrowing down the highlights of all the out of this world stories getting Hugo Awards love this year will be tough. After all, the annual awards honor the greatest achievements in science fiction and fantasy storytelling for the year, and this past year had a lot — and we mean a lot — of noteworthy genre work in multiple media, including film, television, prose fiction, and comics (among many others). But we’re going to try. 

The finalists for the 2020 Hugo Awards were announced today, and among them are two Marvel movies (Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel), the latest Star Wars film (The Rise of Skywalker), two episodes of HBO’s Watchmen (“A God Walks into Abar” and “This Extraordinary Being”), an episode of The Mandalorian (“Redemption”), a Doctor Who episode (“Resolution”), and Amazon Studios’ miniseries adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens. 

There’s also Jordan Peele’s social horror film Us, The Good Place episode “The Answer,” and the “Cibola Burn” episode of The Expanse.

In the Best Graphic Story or Comic category, it's a tossup between Die Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, LaGuardia, Mooncakes, Paper Girls Volume 6, The Wicked + The Divine Volume 9, and Monstress Volume 4: The Chosen.

Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night is one of the books vying for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, as is Kameron Hurley's sci-fi military novel The Light Brigade.

Author Ted Chiang has both a novella (“Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”) and novelette (“Omphalos”) under consideration. And short stories on the list include “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” by Shiv Ramdas, “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang, and “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon.

And that's just scratching the surface of the worthy finalists. Check out the delightfully geeky announcement video below for all the noms, or visit the the Hugo Awards’ website for the full list of finalists, including those for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the 1945 Retro-Hugo Awards.

The awards will be presented at CoNZealand, which will take place online from July 29 to Aug. 2. George R.R. Martin is set to serve as toastmaster and host the awards.