Hugo Award for Best Series
The Hugo Awards are given every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine "Amazing Stories", and was once officially known as the Science Fiction Achievement Award. It has been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing". The Hugo Award for Best Series is given each year for series of science fiction or fantasy stories published consisting of at least 3 works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The Hugo Award for Best Series has been awarded annually since 2017. It was started then as a one-time special Hugo Award in advance of a vote to make it a permanent category, and was ratified as such by members of the World Science Fiction Society that year.
Hugo Award for Best Fanzine
The award was first presented in 1955, and has been given annually since except for in 1958. A "fanzine" is defined for the award as a magazine that does not meet the Hugo award's criteria for a professional or semi-professional magazine. Specifically, it must meet less than two of the five Hugo criteria for consideration as a semiprozine: that the magazine had an average press run of at least one thousand copies per issue, paid its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication, provided at least half the income of any one person, had at least fifteen percent of its total space occupied by advertising, and announced itself to be a semiprozine. This is the oldest long-running Hugo award for fan activity; in 1967 Hugo Awards were added specifically for fan writing and fan art. In addition to the regular Hugo awards, beginning in 1996 Retrospective Hugo Awards, or "Retro Hugos", have been available to be awarded for years 50, 75, or 100 years prior in which no awards were given. To date, Retro Hugo awards have been awarded for 1939, 1941, 1946, 1951, and 1954, and the fanzine category has been included each year.