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The 2014 Hugo Awards
Dave Knott writes: WorldCon 2014 wrapped up in London this last weekend and this year's Hugo Award winners were announced. Notable award winners include:
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
If there's one thing I've learned reading all kinds of award-winning books, is that more often than not, the award is a big warning that the book is shit, or pompous, or written specifically to woo often sophisticated, pedantic jury members into giving the award.
In short, I usually go for stuff that hasn't been awarded certain kinds of awards. The Hugo certainly seems overrated these days, and has been for many years.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If the award is to be given to an actual science fiction movie? Europa Report.
This is undoubtedly the first hugo award for a graphic story featuring stick figures.
Ancillary Justice has its merits but read like an first novelist's smart attempt at crossing Alistair Reynolds with Iain M. Banks. Indeed, all three can/could do with good editors to tidy the worst longeurs. There's a little too much fashion sometimes; I rate Phillip Mann's The Disestablishment of Paradise as the strongest sf novel I've read in the past year, stylistically, structurally, thematically and in its characterisation and humour; it betters the Leckie IMO but only made one of the shortlists.
[/. Member, AC due to travel]
It's actually several thousand frames that play out a sequence of events. It was notable both because of the unique presentation (most frames, particularly the early ones, change only subtly) and because of the details that go into establishing the otherwise unexplained setting.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Considering it was one spot from the bottom of the list you only disregarded Game of Thrones.
What you see at that link is only the last panel. The story was revealed frame-by-frame over a much longer period of time.
I do think it would be nice if xkcd made the whole thing available, but others have managed. The Wikipedia link above can point you at some of them.
...it's an attempt to protest the forces of political correctness (represented by Wiscon's radical feminist faction) who are attempting to get people fired for not toeing the line.
Theodore Beale (who uses the en name Vox Day) has generally been making enemies by being racist, sexist and generally unpleasant. He does seem to have at least some fans though.
He allegedly encouraged his fans to buy a memebership solely to get his short story on the ballot.
Probably wouldn't have blown up quite so much but Beale seems to have been winding up the sci-fi writers association for some time.
From the Hugos' webiste:
"Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?
While the World Science Fiction Society sponsors the Hugos, they are not limited to sf. Works of fantasy or horror are eligible if the members of the Worldcon think they are eligible."
--JLockard - "Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." - Emo Phillips
So is historical fiction if the theme seems sci-fi enough; Apollo 13 had a nomination.
Maybe it's because opinion is subjective.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Largely unsuccessful" is a bit of an understatement. Those who follow such things have been rejoicing that the "Sad Puppy Slate" ended up last in all the author categories, and that the novella by Vox Day, the guy with very... questionable political and personal views, actually ended up below "No Award". I think it's interesting that despite the outcries and rage and threats about "No Awarding" the entire slate, the only nominee to actually meet such a fate was the one that almost everyone agreed was literarily a piece of garbage.
One does have to wonder how the "Sad Puppy Slate" would have done if it hadn't weighed itself down with a nominee that was simultaneously so objectionable and so poorly written.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...
http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I agree about the winners in recent years, although I usually peruse the best novel nominees, quite a few of my favourite books have been "losing" Hugo or Nebula nominees.
Oh no... it's the future.
But I found much of the tension to be very artificial. For example (spoilers ahoy!), when Bullock and Clooney reach ISS, both being tethered with a rope. And are no longer moving. Yet, Bullock is forced to cut the rope, because of... what, exactly? (yes, their characters had names, no longer remember them)
I am a big Scalzi fan and have loved every bit of his fiction that I have read - except for Redshirts. So I don't get it either, but a lot of people love it. A TV show will come of it and that escapes me as well. Apparently we are just not in touch with something a lot of other people see in it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
it was fictional. it was about science. what more do you want? I would say Apollo 13 and the right stuff aren't science fiction, but most every other movie involving space is science fiction.
That sounds mysterious. You should investigate.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's soft sci-fi pretending to be hard sci-fi.
It's perfectly fine to have non-realistic physics in science fiction. It just needs some justification or explanation. Future super-tech that hasn't been invented, or a revolution in our understanding of the universe. This is a good thing: It lets you introduce a 'magic box' like a perfect lie detector or an artificial intelligence and then examine the impact it would have. Or it can just serve as the backdrop to a more conventional story, like a space opera - just throw in some vague mumbling about the hyperdrive, it doesn't matter how the thing is supposed to work so long as it gets the characters where they need to go.
But Gravity doesn't have that excuse. It's supposed to be realistic. It's supposed to be near-future. That sets certain constraints. For a layperson it might be acceptable for an astronaut to jump out the ISS and achieve an orbital intersection and velocity match by eye with a distant station - but for anyone who knows the slightest thing about space travel, or has played Kerbal Space Program, this as as glaring a violation of the established rules of the setting as if she'd cobbled together a teleporter from the wreckage.
I'm sure you're right, but I did enjoy Equoid by Charles Stross. Then again, I'm a fan of the Laundry series, so I'm not going to be that critical of his writing.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
"the book is shit, or pompous, or written specifically to woo often sophisticated, pedantic jury members into giving the award."
Over 3,500 people voted on the Hugos this year, not exactly a tiny jury.
The problem here for a lot of people is it breaks them out of their suspension of disbelief. We've established this as a representation of a fairly realistic world when something we know wouldn't happen happens.
If we established earlier that this was a world with its own physics then we'd accept it.
>If Americans can find the courage to consciously reject the myth of the melting pot and expel the Mexicans from the American Southwest, the Arabs from Detroit and the Somalis from Minneapolis, they can reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.
or maybe
>EuropeÃ(TM)s demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as womenÃ(TM)s individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing EuropeÃ(TM)s birth rates far below replacement levels
or
>The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls
Yeah, I don't think it takes a lot of digging to find out he is a racist, sexist scumbag.
I really liked Europa Report and I recommend it to sci-fi fans. But the criticisms against that movie were well placed, and Best Dramatic Presentation? If anything, the movie was intentionally downplaying the inherent drama of their predicament in order to keep the movie grounded in a more documentary format. Sci-fi fans should definitely check out Europa Report, but I don't think it would have won here.
Click the panel itself. Brings you here:
http://geekwagon.net/projects/...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Good science fiction is (almost) ALWAYS about people, and how they react in an environment that is altered by a technology, or an event, or some other external influence that simply wasn't imaginable until our understanding of the universe progressed (the science part of the fiction). While there are some examples that differ from this, if you take a look through your favorite stories, they almost all conform to this pattern.
In this case, it's an exploration of what happens to someone who is in orbit during an event that leads to Kessler Syndrome. I'm not saying the film deserved to win, but I think complaining that "this isn't science fiction" is decidedly unwarranted.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Short story under 7,500 words
Novelette 7,500 and 17,500 words
Novella 17,500 and 40,000 words
Novel 40,000 +
I know you were trying to be cheeky, but there is a specific answer to your question.
Yes, but I know full well that when an object's motion is arrested, the object will not continue pulling on whatever arrests it.
I've read some of what he's written on his blog, and I am more than satisfied that he's a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit who completely deserves all the opprobrium he receives. What's worse, he's one of those crazy religious fanatics who twists the bible into excuses to hate people, like the Westborough folks. As a human, I find him utterly contemptible.
Nevertheless, if I'd been voting on the Hugos this year, I would have judged his work on its own merit. I still find Orson Scott Card an outstanding writer, despite my (milder) contempt for the man himself. Fortunately, I have many friends who were Hugo voters this year, who are also capable of separating their opinion of the artist from their opinion of the art, and they have uniformly told me that the work didn't deserve a nomination, let alone a win. Maybe it wasn't bad enough to end up below no-award--maybe that happened because of Day's vile on-line persona--but the fact that it didn't win seems to me to be fully justified.
Wow, just wow. That was the worst summation of the situation that didn't devolve into outright fantasies. Vox Day was only even tangentially involved to help prove the point of Sad Puppies II.
http://monsterhunternation.com...
http://monsterhunternation.com...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
I picked up a collection of Hugo Award winners, as edited by Isaac Asimov - I found the writing incredibly pretentious and the stories almost seemed to take a back seat. They were a massive disappointment to me.
Hugo winners are often incredible stories - I've read a lot of them, and while some of them are crap, a lot of them are very, very good. Really, it depends a lot on the year they were written - if the collection you read was from the 70s, then I can see why you thought they were crap; the popular scifi writing style in in that decade was ... well ... pretentious. It's also possible that you just don't like the same kinds of stories Asimov likes - as editor, the stories were chosen by him.
YA SF/F novels are still SF/F novels. I fully approve any writer who can write good YA stuff. Just because it's for youngsters doesn't mean it has to be bad.
Correia seemed to be trying to rudely bully a lot of people to make it clear that he doesn't like all of you politically correct liberal liberal liberals out there in the publishing business. He was the one who brought Beale in to offend anybody who's even vaguely possible to offend; I don't like people doing that at parties I'm attending. (He also ran a campaign slate for nominees, which is pretty much not done (except every publisher saying "hey, vote for all OUR stuff.") I assume they did that together, but I don't know either of them. Their other main slate-member was Torgerson, who writes Mormonish mil-sci-fi. (He also threw the Schlock Mercenary comic in as a graphic work, which I found quite enjoyable back when it was originally nominated but which wasn't eligible as a 2013 work, so I thought that was tacky.)
Beale's fiction wasn't, in my opinion, Hugo quality, but it would have been ok in a pulp magazine back when those were the dominant form. His personal writings are so creepy that I can see why anybody willing to vote for his work would get criticism; reminds me of the "Vote for the Crook" election in Louisiana a few years back. Correia's writing is entertaining, in a mostly cartoonish way, and I'm ok with that. Not super deep, moderately fun if you like the stuff. Torgerson's work was so utterly soulless I ranked it below Beale's.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On the official site
Best Novel: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of forty thousand (40,000) words or more.
Best Novella: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.
Best Novelette: Awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seven thousand five hundred (7,500) and seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) words.
Best Short Story: Awarded for science fiction or fantasy story of less than seven thousand five hundred (7,500) words.