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2004 Hugo Awards Presented at Noreascon
Best Novel: Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
Novella: The Cookie Monster, Vernor Vinge
Novellette: Legions in Time, Michael Swanwick
Short Story: A Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Related Book: The Chesley Awards for
Science
Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Retrospective, John Grant, Elizabeth L.
Humphrey,
and Pamela D. Scoville
Professional Editor: Gardner Dozois
Professional Artist: Bob Eggleton
and Pamela D. Scoville
Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Lord of the
Rings:
The Return of the King
Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
Gollum's Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards
Semiprozine: Locus
Fanzine: Emerald City
Fan Writer: Dave Langford
Fan Artist: Frank Wu
Campbell Award: Jay Lake
Special Noreascon Four Committee Award: Erwin Strauss, aka Filthy Pierre
Who won the 1953 retroactive award? The nominees included The Caves of Steel, Fahrenheit 451, and Childhood's End. Yeesh - what a hard call.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Would it be so hard to explain in one little sentence what those award are about?
:)
One little sentence
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
My first WorldCon was San Jose in 2002. I was lucky enough to have a friend there who could show me the ropes - Cheryl Morgan, editor of Emerald City. If you're not familiar with her work, check out www.emcit.com. Her reviews are honest (often brutally so) and entertaining.
You know....
;)
Wikipedia != Authoritative
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
No, these would be awards for books and stories published during calendar 2003. Then you have nominations, then voting and vote-counting, so it's September of the next year before the winners are announced.
Last night some kid at the LAN party I was at came in at around 11 and was like: My dad won a Hugo!! And I asked him about it, and apparently his dad wrote Legions in Time, which is apparently about a man and woman who travel through the galaxy or alternate worlds or something. I guess good luck to that kids dad, and good luck to all those considered and those who won.
They're, like, the Oscars of sci-fi. They're pretty popular; last year, I went out to my local Chapters branch to pick up a copy of Robert J. Sawyer's "Homonids", a recent Hugo Award winner. It turns out that a few days prior, some nutter had been to every major Chapters location in the city and had bought out their entire stock of the book. As the clerk helping me out sighed, "The Hugo Awards make people do strange things."
http://www.analogsf.com/0406/cookiemonster.shtml
:)
Yeah. Finally a topic where my sig fits
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
From FAQ of Hugo awards: ..."It's all fantasy," he proclaimed. "Science fiction is fantasy you can convince yourself might happen. ...."
"Aren't Hugos just for Science Fiction?
Have you ever tried to define science fiction?
I like, for example, LoTR as much as anyone else and find it one of the best trilogies ever (as novels). But, what has magic, dragons, castles etc. to do with science? If science or scientific methodology is not part of the story then why should it be eligible for this award? What happened to the heritage of Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, and others?
Has popular themes of Star Wars and Star Trek reduced Sci-Fi to mere fantasy now?
As a scientist myself, I still believe that Sci-Fi is more than simple fantasy. It is -to me- exploration of possibilities for humanity's future (and past), scientific developments, and their effects. Believe me, in today's incredible speed of scientific progress we need Sci-Fi in this sense more than ever.
I am sure the winner is a wonderful novel but...
For the lazy, here is a link to the video.
t ml
http://www.theonering.net/staticnews/1054890864.h
Lois Bujold's best work is the Lord Vorkosigan series. She won a Hugo for one of those in 1992. But she has to pay the rent, so she cranks out those fantasy novels. The Vorkosigan series is too complex and unsettling for many readers.
My problem with Illium is that you just can't see exactly where it's going.
Yeah, I always hate that in a book!
mods.. maybe you should read? couple of comments up
***********
The 1953 Retrospective Hugo Award Winners
*
Best Novel - Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Best Novella - "A Case of Conscience" by James Blish
Best Novelette - "Earthman, Come Home" by James Blish
*
oh and to add something new.. the nominees for best novel:**Best Novel of 1953 (113 ballots)
* The Caves of Steel -- Isaac Asimov (Galaxy, Oct.-Dec. 1953)
* Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury (Ballantine)
* Childhood's End -- Arthur C. Clarke (Ballantine)
* Mission of Gravity -- Hal Clement (Astounding, April-July 1953)
* More than Human -- Theodore Sturgeon (Ballantine)
***
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That's ridiculous! This is science fiction, why can't they announce the winners of next year's competition?
#!/usr/bin/english
Not commenting on whether the latest Harry Potter book should have been on the list or not, I cannot see that sales figures should be a reason for giving a book an award.
High sales figures != quality
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
Neil Gaiman's winning short story is up on his site, if anyone cares to read it. It's quite good, particularly if you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes, Cthulu mythology, or both.
--- Bwah?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
The Cookie Monster, Vernor Vinge: This is an interesting and technically complex story. It's plausible and well-told, but it really lacks character development IMHO. Guess the competition was thin in the "novella" category or the tech talk swayed the fans.
"Legions in Time", Michael Swanwick: This one rocked. The main characters were believable, the time travel was done well, the bad guys were really evil, and the resolution was... interesting. Only real faults are that the ending feels a bit too much like a Deus Ex Machina, and Nadine was never really explained. Read this one if you can.
"A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman: Hmm. Gaiman's a good storyteller, but he bit off more than he could chew here. It's difficult to write a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it's difficult to write a good H.P. Lovecraft pastiche, and it's even more difficult to write a story that combines elements of both. Plus, if you haven't read much Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or H.P. Lovecraft, you won't get all the references. Gaiman almost made it work.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
The Cookie Monster, Vernor Vinge: This is an interesting and technically complex story. It's plausible and well-told, but it really lacks character development IMHO. Guess the competition was thin in the "novella" category or the tech talk swayed the fans.
Yeah, the main character would have been more deeply depicted had he not been busy saying, "COOOOOKIIEE!! MMNOMMNOMMMMNOMMN!" This is even more justification for Nabisco to host his next intervention.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Because it's good, maybe?
What are you asking for, exactly? Clearly the story has a resounding appeal to thousands of readers, if not more. I imagine it'd be nice for your ego if they all abandoned their own preferences and adopted yours, which, I'm sure are way more informed and well-reasoned to you.
You'll have to pardon the others, though, if they don't quite see it that way.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
It's easy to show that fantasy and SF are distinct if you cherry-pick your examples (LoTR), but can you give us a definition of one genre or the other that can be applied to any arbitrary work to decide whether it fits into one or the other categories? I contend you can't.
:)
My standard example is two Zelazny novels: _Lord of Light_ and _Creatures of Light and Darkness_. Both are tales of wars between gods of ancient pantheons (Hindu in the former, Egyptian in the latter). However, in the first, the "gods" are explained as being psychically gifted humans who have managed to take over a lost colony, and who vigorously suppress all use of technology among the colonists, and reserve it for themselves, so they can appear more godlike to their subjects. Their technology is not particularly advanced (airplanes, lasers, telephones) except for the mind-transfer machine that they use to provide "reincarnation" for themselves and the more favored of their subjects. By contrast, in the latter novel, no attempt is made at all to explain these "gods", but the story is full of standard SF elements - spaceships and interstellar travel, computers, cyborgs, etc. I've seen people argue for hours about whether and how either of these books should be categorized.
Magic, Dragons and Castles? How about Psionics, Dragons and Castles? How about Anne McAffrey's Pern series, where the dragons are actually alien creatures native to the planet, and the humans live in castles because they've lost the technology they used to come to the planet? Scientific Methodology? How about Randall Garrett's stories of Lord D'Arcy, whose research magicians are bound by laws as rigorous and scientific as anything propounded by Newton or Einstein, even though they don't happen to apply in our universe.
Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke? Aside from Lem (who I'm not too familiar with) and perhaps Dick (whose stuff was considered so outrageous that some people questioned whether any of it could be called SF), there isn't a writer there who hasn't written both SF and Fantasy, and occasionally, the hard-to-classify story on the boundaries between the genres (e.g. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God).
By the 1950s, it was clear that the writers were going to treat any attempt to define the boundaries between SF and Fantasy as a challenge. You're fighting a battle that was lost half a century ago, and citing as authorities the very people who carried the other side to victory. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic" -- A. Clarke.
Myself, like you, I generally prefer SF, insofar as I can distinguish it, but beyond that, I also prefer the rigorous logic and internal consistency of a Lord D'Arcy fantasy over the psuedo-scientific babble of most Hollywood SF. Anyway, Bujold is primarily a science fiction writer, so I find it hard to complain too much when her fantasy novel wins the Hugo.
I call conspiracy.