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SSSS.GRIDMAN, Girls' Last Tour Win at 50th Seiun Science-Fiction Awards

The 58th Japan Science Fiction Convention (Nihon SF Taikai) revealed the winners for the 50th Seiun Awards on July 27. The SSSS.GRIDMAN anime won this year's Media category, and Tsukumizu's Girls' Last Tour manga won this year's Comic category.

Studio Nue co-founder Naoyuki Katō (The Legend of the Galactic Heroes mechanical design, Guin Saga novel illustrations) won the Art category for the eighth time since 1979. Tsutsui Yasutaka, Jisaku o Kataru (Interview with Yasutaka Tsutsui), the autobiography by The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Paprika author Yasutaka Tsutsui, won the Nonfiction category.

Hirotaka Tobi won the Japanese Long Story category with Harmonielehre, and Gengen Kusano (Last and First Idol) won the Japanese Short Story category with "Dark Seiyū." The Mecha Samurai Empire novel, written by Peter Tieryas and translated by Naoya Nakahara, won the Translated Long Story category, and Liu Cixin's "The Circle" (translated by Ken Liu and Naoya Nakahara) won the Tranlated Short Story category.

MINERVA-II1, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft's rendezvous with asteroid 162173 Ryugu, won the "Free" category.

The awards this year are again separated into nine categories: Japanese Novel, Japanese Short Story, Translated Novel, Translated Short Story, Media, Comic, Art, Nonfiction, and a "Free" category. Each category has between 5-10 nominees. The nominees were chosen among works that were released between January 1 and December 31, 2018.

The attendees of "Sci-con," the 58th Japan Science Fiction Convention in Saitama, voted on the winners, and the staff announced the winners at the convention on July 27.

The nominees of the Media and Comic categories were:

Media Category

• SSSS.GRIDMAN anime
• Ready Player One film
• Cells at Work! anime
• Beatless anime
• Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan anime
• Planet With anime
• Penguin Highway anime
• Baahubali 2: The Conclusion film
• Pacific Rim: Uprising film

Comic Category

• Satoshi Mizukami's Kyomu o Yuku
• Yukinobu Hoshino's Rainman manga (complete, seven volumes)
• Tsukumizu's Girls' Last Tour (complete, six volumes)
• Kenta Shinohara's Astra Lost in Space (complete, five volumes)
• Masaru Ohishi's Martian Dice (complete, three volumes)
• Maiko Ogawa's Hitori Bocchi no Chikyū Shinryaku (complete, 15 volumes)
• Masato Hisa's Jabberwocky 1914 (complete, four volumes)

The artists redjuice, Yūko Shiraishi, Naoyuki Katō, Jūryoku Iwagō, Masato Hisa, Yukinobu Hoshino, Jun Kawana, Keiji Hida, Yasushi Suzuki, and Sana Takeda received nominations in the art category.

The nominees in the "Free" category included the first-ever third printing of any SF Magazine issue (for the February 2019 issue, which had a special feature devoted to yuri), Space X's circumlunar tour announcement, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft's rendezvous with asteroid 162173 Ryugu, the discovery of the most distant celestial object in our solar system, and Hachioji Yume Art Museum's Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneamise exhibition.

"Seiun Shō" literally translates to "nebula awards," but the Japan SF Con's Seiun Awards are more akin to the Hugo Awards, in that the attendees of each respective convention vote on the winners. There is another set of awards, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan's Nihon SF Taishō honors, that are the rough Japanese equivalent of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Awards. Like the Hugo Awards, the Seiun Awards honor all forms of speculative fiction — including but not limited to science fiction — and related materials.

Previous winners of the Seiun Awards include Kemono Friends, And Yet the Town Moves, Shin Godzilla, Kochikame, Girls und Panzer, Knights of Sidonia, The World of Narue, Bodacious Space Pirates, Range Murata, Masamune Shirow, Makoto Shinkai, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gundam: The Origin, 20th Century Boys, Summer Wars, Cardcaptor Sakura, Madoka Magica, Pacific Rim, Space Battleship Yamato 2199, Moyashimon, and more.

Sources: Japan Science Fiction Convention, Comic Natalie