2003 Hugo Award Winners Announced

securitas writes "For those that follow these sorts of things, the 2003 Hugo Award Winners list has been released (PDF). Robert Sawyer's 'Homonids' won Best Novel, fan favorite Neil Gaiman won Best Novella for 'Coraline', Geoffery A. Landis won Best Short Story for 'Falling Onto Mars', Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Conversations with Dead People' won Best Short Form Dramatic Presentation and predictably 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' won Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation. You can get all the details at the Torcon 2003 Hugo Awards section."

Comments

Good for Buffy

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of awards have overlooked the series in the past when they've been deserving.

Re:Good for Buffy

[cherokee158]

Granted, Buffy does not fit what a lot of people would consider the usual definition of science fiction (science being conspicously absent), but it is a well-written show. I really could not understand what people saw in this show for the longest time, but boredom and a Buffy Viewer's Choice marathon changed my mind almost overnight. Suspension of disbelief was a battle for me with this one, but once I grudgingly accepted the premise, I grew to love the characters and relish every chapter of a story that was sometimes funny, sometimes scary, and always suprising. Like most good writing, the story does not immediately make itself appreciated, but once you have seen enough to become aware of the characters and appreciate the story arcs, it gets into your pores and stays there. In less than one year, I went from Buffy-hater to owning the entire series on DVD. Don't let the obvious bullseye this series paints on the teen target market lull you into thinking this show is just fluff. It makes some very sly jabs at just about every genre cliche there is, and, if you let it, can move you to screams, tears or fits of laughter all in a single episode. That being said, go ahead and hate it if you want. More DVD's for me :-)

Re:Good for Buffy

[Abcd1234]

Buffy fans in the audience forgive me, but I think the majority of that show's fanbase is composed of...

And I think all people who are interested in computers are geeky, socially inept freaks. Oh, wait, that's wrong too... this is what happens when you try to stereotype a group of people who are interested in something you're not. After all, just because you don't "get it" doesn't mean that there isn't a diverse group of people out there who disagree with you.

Re:Is scifi just to placify geeks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sci-Fi does advance science; where do you think scientists get ideas, most modern tech was first thought up in science fiction. My PDA looks a lot like a star trek PADD, my cell phone looks like a communicator.

That's not even taking into account all the kids who grow up reading sci-fi and grow up to be scientists because of it.

You're an idiot.

Ironic about Buffy....

[GrnArmadillo]

Winning an award after the show bows for an episode about ghosts of the past. :) Also note how Buffy creator Joss Whedon has three of the nominated episodes (for his other two shows, "Angel" and the late "Firefly") while the other two noms belong to "Enterprize". It's a small world these days.....

Re:Ironic about Buffy....

[quacking duck]

I was rooting for Firefly's "Serenity", but this Buffy ep was about as deserving. Far more so than the two nominated "Enterprise" eps.

Re:Is scifi just to placify geeks?

[efuseekay]

Not everybody wants to be a scientist, especially when you get low pay, poor advancement and lousy job opportunities. And that's after you have spent 5-7 years slogging away as a slave in grad school....

On the other hand, doing science is the most rewarding experience I've ever had*.

Btw, Geoffery Landis is himself a scientist...

* Other than hot, steamy sex.

Hugos these days...

[theoddball]

Nice to see the literary Hugos are going to actual SF again...two years of solid selections. I think it was 2001 when Harry Potter won best novel, and I just shook my head... I have nothing against HP, but it doesn't deserve a Hugo. It's not adult fiction, and it's not even science fiction (which is, of course, the focus of the Hugo... I disagree with the folks who keep saying SF is "incredibly boring" these days, though--it's just on a different tack.

Re:Hugos these days...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nothing against HP, but it doesn't deserve a Hugo. It's not adult fiction, and it's not even science fiction

Well, narrowing down the Hugo awards to science fiction only isn't exactly correct. But setting that aside, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire most certainly is adult fiction. It's written in such a way that it's suitable entertainment for kids, but the themes are definitely adult. Murder, death, destiny, revenge, and the constant, underlying idea that you can't, so to speak, judge a book by its cover.

Don't assume that a book that's beloved by kids isn't for adults.

Re:Hugos these days...

[sparrow_hawk]

Err... umm...
Nice to see the literary Hugos are going to actual SF again..
I have nothing against HP, but it doesn't deserve a Hugo. It's not adult fiction, and it's not even science fiction

So... have you read Coraline? As with much great fantasy (yes, fantasy -- not science fiction), it operates on two levels. For children, it's an adventure story; for adults, a horror story. It is undeniably written for children, however, yet it's definately a great read however old you are. :) It just goes to show that good "children's literature" is good literature, period.

Science fiction?

[Scrameustache]

Why are fantasy and horror works winning sci-fi awards?

The award will stop to have any meaning if they don't stick to its niche.

Re:Science fiction?

[fishexe]

bah, sci-fi doesn't even mean anything anymore anyways. Haven't you seen how many books about wizards and dragons are in the sci fi section of the bookstore?

Re:Science fiction?

[Scrameustache]

Haven't you seen how many books about wizards and dragons are in the sci fi section of the bookstore?

Bookstore managers and their inability to classify their wares adequatly should not be a trend setter for people handing out awards. THEY should know better.

Re:Science fiction?

[bluGill]

Anymore? Historicly Sci-fi did include fantasy, just look at all the old Andre Norton works that were more fantasy than sci-fi. For that matter anything fantasy was sci-fi.

Good authors write, bad authors worry about what catagory their books will be clasified in before they start. Start with an idea, and make it work. If it is hard science fiction, good, if it isn't, good. It might appeal more to someone if it fits a catagory, but only after a good book is written do you decide if you like it.

Re:Science fiction?

[gl4ss]

dunno, because there's not awful of new science fiction coming nowadays that is 'traditional' science fiction? especially not too much of good stuff that really have something to say about the world today and fit into that.

i still manage to find stuff to read though.. but i've rarely put much merit on awards anyways and since i haven't been around to read most of the stuff as fresh i can read decades old stuff as new(and why shouldn't everyone?).

besides they're more like of an obviously fiction awards than scifi awards.. to me scifi is speculative fiction at it's best, so i rank wide amounts of green little men from mars stuff out of it too(that doesn't mean i don't read them or like them when they're good)

more than that i'd much more like to see awards for books i shouldn't read(along with reasons, by people who have read the book completely and are not retards), of such books i've lately read jeff longs 'year zero'. it suck. heavily. it was _BAD_, i did give it the chance though and read it till the end but the book is nothing but pure populistic disease fear shit mixed with cloning(of _jesus_ none the less) and end of the civilised world scenario mixed with petty rivalry and broken family and resurrection-cloning nonsense. the kinda shit book why people fear cloning and the cloning being in it mostly for no reason at all than because cloning is hip,any other explanation for the multiple retarded jesuses would have done just as well, if not better. but wait! the jesuses itself had barely any function for the story at all anyways, heck, the cloning wasn't even used for a cause of the disease sweeping everyone away so there was totally zero reasons to use it all. the book could have been much much better with much of the stuff left out, so instead of 500 pages it could have been a great book at 300 pages.. one reason why i tend to stay away from books with 500+ pages, they generally are big just because they're bloated or the wording is bad, exceptions happen of course. the new harry potter for example is so thick just because it has outrageously big font and the lines are way too much away from each other too but i guess having '700pages' was a selling point too in it's weird way, perhaps a way to justify greater price too(more like 300 pages if it was printed like a normal book, scifi it certainly was not, childrens book is the most fitting description, while it's not that bad it's not _great_ either).

yes this turned into a slash-rant that begins vagely following the subject at hand and then runs away.

Re: Science fiction?

[gidds]

...The Truman Show... also got nominations in the past, despite not being science fiction.

Why doesn't The Truman Show count as science fiction?

The absence of space travel, laser guns and robots doesn't stop something being science fiction, just as their presence doesn't guarantee it is. Good science fiction has always been about ideas -- about ideas that change society or our relationship with the universe.

For example, I've always considered most 'space opera' such as Star Wars to be simply adventure stories that happen to be set in space - not science fiction at all. Conversely, stories like The Truman Show which are about ideas, about the nature of the world, and which invoke a sense of wonder, strike me as being much closer to the heart of science fiction. (Though there's actually quite a bit of technology involved in the backstory to TTS too.) And of course there are stories with both, like Bladerunner, which not only has a future setting with all the trappings, but a plot which directly involves the nature of that setting, and asks deep questions about personal identity.

Re:Science fiction?

[nathanh]

True. Pleasantville, The Truman Show and Harry Potter also got nominations in the past, despite not being science fiction.

The Truman Show is definitely sci-fi. Existing scientific knowledge was used a plot device to explore Truman's connection between perception and reality. Without the scientific underpinnings such as 24x7 hidden cameras and an artifical world for Truman, the story would have made no sense. This is what separates true sci-fi from "fantasies in space" like Star Wars.

Other sci-fi stories that aren't immediately obvious are Make Room, Make Room and 1984. In the first story the plot device is world famine due to a population explosion. In the second story the plot device is governmental monitoring and control of media, used to oppress the people. Neither of those stories requires any "fantasy" science like hyperengines or warpblasters, yet they're still sci-fi.

Re:Dangit....

[el-spectre]

The book wasn't bad... not incredibly believable, but entertaining. The movie... eh... I feel bad for the trees that died to make the cellulose for the film...

Re:Is scifi just to placify geeks?

[theoddball]

Sci-Fi does advance science; where do you think scientists get ideas, most modern tech was first thought up in science fiction. No. In general, SF derives from existing scientfic concepts. It's not as if authors are sitting around and think "Hey, you know what'd be cool? Some kinda energy source from little tiny particles called atoms smashing into each other!" Enrico Fermi didn't learn how fission works from reading SF. Even pulling ideas from existing science, the genre has gotten it wrong plenty of times. It was Gibson (I think) that wrote a story where characters see all these bizarre rocketships and flying things in the sky, and strange vehicles on the ground...in the end, these crazy vehicles turn out to be all the pictures of silver ships and flying cars and nuclear thingamajigs from the 1950s pulp mags. Kim Stanley Robinson has written about a lot of prospective, uninvented things in his Mars series, but he didn't start from nothing--a lot of the ideas in those books was first proposed by NASA researchers and guys like Robert Zubrin. Hell, he even takes stuff from the 100 Day Plan. SF and science feed off each other, true...but SF != source of science.

Since when are Buffy and Coraline Sci-Fi?

[Snowspinner]

This is not a knock against either Buffy or Coraline - I have Buffy seasons 1-7 on my bookshelf, and my Neil Gaiman collection is probably worth about $1000. But neither of them are science fiction. Coraline is a children's horror novel. A wonderful children's horror novel, but a children's horror novel all the same.

Maybe a case can be made for Buffy, since it's at least had sci-fi moments in its series, but Conversations With Dead People was not one of them.

I mean, yeah, a case can be made that the Hugos need to start acknowledging things beyond straight sci-fi if they're going to survive as a relevent and interesting award. But if they're going to do that, they should stop calling themselves a science fiction award. And they should also pause to ask whether, with the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards around, such a move is really necessary.

Oh well. Grats to Gaiman and Whedon anyway. =)

Just how many times has locus won best semipro ?

[Crashmarik]

Is it just the fact that locus is about the only quality entry in the category ? They seem to win every year.

Re:Is scifi just to placify geeks?

[dspeyer]

Science fiction occasionally advances science, the communications satellite being the famous example, but the real idea is to advance society around science. As science overtakes science fiction (usually co-incidentally) society struggles to adapt. It's good that there are at least a few people who have already thought about how to respond to changes like those which happen!

Re:Yay Canada!

[allrong]

I find it a bit sad that Sawyer's books have big blurb's trumpeting how he is Canada's answer to xxx. UK SF also seems to have had an inferiority complex up until recently with cover quotes of how author Y has revitilised UK SF.

I am very surprised that Australian SF book covers have not done the same over the past decade. We are usually quite noisy about promoting Aussieness, to our eternal detriment.

I enjoyed reading Sawyer's Calculating God, but after seeing his website sfwriter.com I'm quite put off by this guy's self-promotion.

Re:_Hominids_ is book one of a trilogy

[Curunir_wolf]

So he stole the plot from Sliders? Oh, no, wait. Those were "kromags". Never mind.