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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."
A lot of awards have overlooked the series in the past when they've been deserving.
And yet another year passes in which they fail to acknowledge the wonderous story that is Battlefield:Earth.
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.....
I've read a bunch of Sawyer's books (his present-day/near-present-day sci-fi) and they do not dissapoint. I found it funny that I spotted Hominids in the store the other day and picked it up, and now I hear it won the Hugo :)
Heh... he's also Canadian! Yay Canada!
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.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
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.
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
That's because the second foundation trilogy sucked.
Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was totally derivative, had a fairly lame "cyberpunk-lite" plot, and was written by three different people. IMO, Asimov ruined both the Foundation and Robots series when he merged them in his later years. Not quite as badly as Heinlein messed up his own series with dreck like Number of the Beast, but still pretty bad.
There are still some good SF authors out there, though: Kim Stanley Robinson, CJ Cherryh, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, ....
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. =)
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Yeah...'cause "conversations with dead people" was chuck full of science-fiction
In that case, I hearby nominate Jonathan Edwards for the 2004 Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I don't think it's the same people giving themselves awards. The Hugos are awarded by the membership of the World Science-Fiction Convetion (http://www.worldcon.org/). Yes, many authors are members, but the bulk are just fen. So the awards are given by a few thousand people active in the SF fan community.
That said, yes, it's not particularly scientific or democratic. But that's what the award means - WorldCon thinks this book is the best. If you aren't happy with the selections, you can do what I did this year. I purchased a relatively inexpensive associate (non-attending) membership which allowed me to vote for the Hugos, and I'll be able to nominate for next year's awards too.
Of course none of the entries I voted for won. Too bad, because Kiln People rocked.
Is it just the fact that locus is about the only quality entry in the category ? They seem to win every year.
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!
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
>they do not dissapoint
That is, if you're not bothered by details like scientific plausability, plot, characterization, etc.
I have not read Hominids (although the reviews of it I have seen have not been promising), but I did read Starplex, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and that was such a singularly wretched novel that I haven't read another Sawyer novel since.
This is clearly a case of "home cooking," since Worldcon was held in Sawyer's back yard. It's very sad that Sawyer won a Hugo before (and here's just a partial list) Gene Wolfe, Howard Waldrop, Pat Cadigan, China Mieville, Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, John Kessel, Iain Banks, Michaael Bishop...
Well, the list of science fiction writers better than Robert J. Sayer who haven't won a Hugo just goes on and on, doesn't it?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
A lot of people seem to think that the Hugos are being lessened by being granted to works that aren't strictly sci-fi.
. htm
But these days there's very little sci-fi that's actually science fiction. Most of it is fantasy with computers.
China Mieville (one of the Hugo-nominated authors this year) has an excellent essay on the subject of what he calls "weird fiction" at his website, http://www.panmacmillan.com/features/china/debate
_Hominids_ is the first book of a Neanderthal trilogy, where Neanderthals on an alternate earth, where Homo sapiens died out instead, use a quantum computer which opens a portal to our world.
The other two books, _Humans_ and _Hybrids_, are now both available. _Humans_ and _Hominids_ are paperbacks and _Hybrids_ *just* came out in hardcover.
If you enjoy good science fiction, read all three. And hopefully _Humans_ or _Hybrids_ makes the ballot again next year (both published first in 2003).
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
James P. Hogan is a Veliskovskian True Believer and this is showing through more and more in his newer writings. There are also quite a few believers in the Singularity (aka Rapture of the Nerds) who are writing SF and furthermore getting it published although since its the sort of thing Slashdot readers dream about it's probably not a cult but a "common interest".