Months after the finalists were announced, a video game has won a Hugo Award for the first time. Gizmodo reports Supergiant Games' Hades has won the one-time award for Best Video Game, beating out the likes of Animal Crossing and The Last of Us: Part II (among others). Creative director Greg Kasavin gave a virtual acceptance speech saying he was "grateful" organizers were recognizing work in the game industry. Hades has been available since September 2020, shortly before the Hugo Awards revealed plans for a game category in November that year. It came to PlayStation and Xbox consoles this August, however. The title has generally received a warm reception through fast-paced roguelike gameplay, a solid narrative element and mechanics that reward repeat playthroughs.

The pictures were shared through the'RAW images' feed on the NASA Perseverance website, which showcases every grab from every camera on the SUV-sized rover NASA's mission will search for signs of ancient life on on the Red Planet. Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover will explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater. This was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake and may have been flooded multiple times when Mars was warm. It is believed the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for proof. Perseverance landed inside the crater on February 18 and will also collect samples of the soil to return to Earth.

For the first time in its storied history, the Hugo Awards will honor a video game. The annual literary award has avoided recognizing the medium for years, but present circumstances being what they are, it will make an exception at the next World Science Fiction Convention in 2021. As you might have guessed, the about-face came out of the coronavirus pandemic, and more specifically the amount of time most in the sci-fi and fantasy communities have spent playing video games in lockdown. In 2021, there's going to be a Hugo Award For Best Video Game. The DisCon III committee has chosen to create this special category for 2021 only, as provided for by the rules of the World Science Fiction Society.#HugoAwards

The Hugo Awards, widely considered the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes, were announced Friday, with female authors dominating and N.K. Jemisin winning the award for novel for the second year in a row. Jemisin, who became the first black author to win the Hugo's novel award last year (for "The Fifth Season"), won again with the book's sequel, "The Obelisk Gate." The third and final book in Jemisin's trilogy, "The Stone Sky," will be released Tuesday. The awards were announced at a ceremony at Worldcon 75, a science fiction festival held this year in Helsinki, Finland. Female authors also took home the awards for novella ("Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire), novelette ("The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon) and short story ("Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar).

The winners of the Hugo Awards were announced at a gala ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, marking a good night for women and authors of color, and a very bad one for the "Puppies." Writers N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, both of whom are African American women, won the novel and novella awards, respectively. It was a defeat for the groups the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, who for two years have semi-successfully gamed the nominations for the Hugos -- which along with the Nebula Awards are generally considered the preeminent awards in science fiction and fantasy -- in an attempt to advance their anti-diversity agendas. Jemisin, who won for her novel "The Fifth Season," referenced the Puppies in her acceptance speech, io9 reports. "Only a small number of ideologues have attempted to game the Hugo Awards," Jemisin said.