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The 2011 Hugo Awards
An anonymous reader writes "The Hugo Award is the leading prize for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy writing. Named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine, the awards have been given out since 1955. This year's winners were announced Saturday during the Hugo Awards Ceremony in Reno, Nevada."
I haven't heard of any of these people.
I mean, it's hard to keep track of any genre entirely. Nor can you blame me for being lax these days, what with the exhausting amount of work it takes sorting out real science fiction from the endless parade of tired paranormal works, PKD clones, and space operas.
But still, I feel like the ghost of Arthur C. Clarke just sneaked into my bedroom and shredded my nerd card. No need to turn it in; I abdicated by placidity and had to be punished.
Of Ted Chiang's six stories written since 2001, four have won the Hugo award, one was nominated for the Hugo award before Chiang withdrew it from consideration (saying "The story that was published isn’t the story I wanted it to be."), and the sixth was a 1 page speculation for Nature magazine.
Seriously, as much as I like that comic, it does not deserve to get it for the third year in a row. Especially since the award's only been around for three years.
To be honest, even the nominations are kind of repetitive. Every year, the latest Schlock Mercenary, Fable, and Girl Genius volume gets nominated (plus a few "mainstream" comics), and GG wins. For three years in a row. And, personally, the 2010 Schlock ("The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse") was way better than the 2010 Girl Genius ("Heirs of the Storm"), especially as science fiction.
I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
Tor has links to online versions of the nominees for Short Story, for Novellette and for four out of the five Novellas.
Connie Willis might be a very nice person, but there's no way Blackout/All Clear is the best sci-fi novel of 2010.
Hugo's have been pretty reliable for a long time now, but it appears they are becoming hidebound and mainstream.
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What? Outfits?
Seriously, though, Inception's probably the best movie I've seen in years. I would probably call it a masterpiece of cinema, if I was an elitist asshole who used such phrases.
The Hugos are awarded by fans, the Nebulas by writers who are members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA. Ca. 2007, a lot of SF writers started questioning whether SFWA was relevant anymore. A couple of their elected officers showed extremely poor judgment (google "sfwa hendrix" and "sfwa burt"), and this seems to have been symptomatic of more widespread dysfunction within the organization.
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You should have at least heard of Connie Willis - on account that she has been around for a while now.
And although Blackout and All Clear have won her a Nebula last year and a Hugo this year - I'd suggest avoiding them for now and reading her Doomsday Book instead.
Which had also won her both a Hugo and a Nebula.
It's in the same set of her time-travel books (even with some of the same characters) as Blackout and All Clear but more importantly - it is MUCH shorter and easier to "digest".
I'm saying that cause, when I looked at reviews on Amazon, almost all 1- and 2-star reviews Blackout (512 pages) and All Clear (656 pages) got were on account of that "It's too long" or "Nothing gets resolved in the first book AND it's too long".
Also, audio books are your friends.
And you can listen to them on your portable communication computer while you're doing other things that require high levels of visual attention but only low levels of mental attention - like walking, driving, jogging, shopping, playing various games etc.
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I'm shocked, half the comments are nerds shitting on the winners. Never would have seen that coming.
It's incomprehensible because it had some number of concurrent and interdependent realities in differing levels of time dilation, enough that not everyone could follow it (though how many did or didn't is up for debate because the number that claimed they did when they didn't and vice versa). That, and it was designed to be incomprehensible as a mechanism to generate discussion about its incomprehensibility.
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The Magicians and The Magician King (by Lev Grossman) are very cool fantasy books (imho). Sure there are tons of Narnia and Potter parallels, but it was nice to see wizardry from a darker, adult perspective. If nothing else, I think you're right, a chance to discover new authors.
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I, for one, am disappointed in Slashdot that all that was stated is why and where the winners were awarded... Can't we at least summarize anymore?
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Do I care?
About six years back I decided to always add the latest Hugo winners to my reading list. Four out of five times I started reading and went, "You're kidding, Hugos. You're kidding, right?"
I disagree - the central premise of Blade Runner wasn't flying cars, it was vat grown Human 2.0s and how we deal (or fail to deal) with the responsibilities inherent in such advanced technology. Inception didn't particularly need to be about technology at all. The technology was there to explain how they got into someone's head, but it could have been about a bunch of people using psychic techniques to achieve the same thing, it wouldn't have changed the story one jot, it was just a convenient metaphor to exlain how this can happen. It said nothing useful about our use of technology, it was entirely about human psychology and the nature of what is real.
The problem with using the Hugo awards to find good sci fi is that the Hugos stopped being a good place to do that when the fantasy fanbois took over the world cons. The thing about the Hugo Awards is that *anybody* who joins a world con can vote for the Hugos; there was always a fringe fantasy element at the cons, but it stopped being fringe all of a sudden. You can pinpoint the year it started, too -- 2001, when a fucking Harry Potter fantasy got Best Novel. Up to 2001, not a single work of fantasy recieved Best Novel. Of the twelve best novel award winners since 2001, seven are works of fantasy. As other people have suggested, look at the nominees and not just the award winners. A quick google will help you weed out the fantasy crap.