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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 don't know any of them either, but I see this as an opportunity to discover new authors. I will sure be looking for some of these in the next few days.
morcego
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.
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.
Find free books.
Having read all the nominees, I think this was not a very strong year. I liked Feed, but I'm sick of zombie novels (and so is everyone else). Cryoburn is (I believe) Book #16 in the Vorkosigan series, and though it's well-executed, it doesn't stand out from the other 15. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is fine, but it suffers from a bit of debutnovelitis. I would have picked either The Dervish House or Blackout/All Clear, and apparently The Dervish House is so little known that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
I disagree about the Hugos being hidebound, though - look at the last three years, with The City and the City, The Graveyard Book, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union all winning - none of which are conventional science fiction at all.
I'm shocked, half the comments are nerds shitting on the winners. Never would have seen that coming.
If you were a British science fiction fan you would certainly have heard of Steven Moffat, who has written some of the best episodes in the Dr. Who reboot, and has been the lead writer and executive producer of the show since Russel T Davis left in 2009.
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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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The other thing to do is make sure you check out the full list of nominees (available here).
I've often read the Winning book and thought "meh" and then gone on to read some of the nominees which I really enjoyed. It's a good shortlist of some great recent sci-fi.
You know, you're absolutely right. The City and the City was terrific and challenging as are the other two you mention. I guess I'm just reacting to what seemed to be a kind of middle of the road year for the Hugos.
Thanks for reminding me of the strength of the past three winners. Maybe they felt like they were going too far afield this year. I do remember feeling a little bit uncomfortable about The Yiddish Policeman's Union winning a Hugo. I didn't think there was any fear of Michael Chabon not getting enough recognition for his excellent novels and I felt like they should have tried to recognize someone who was really putting themselves on the line for sci-fi instead of a well-established literary writer. Maybe I'm the one who's a little too hidebound, but I'd rather see sci-fi writers brought into the mainstream than mainstream writers brought into sci-fi. And I'm still pissed that Anathem didn't win in, what was it, '09.
Oh, and I'm in the middle of Reamde right now and it's a blast.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It was not the greatest year, but Restoration Game and The Dervish House were pretty strong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?"