Hugo Winners, with commentary

[drwex]

I'm indebted to dr_memory for the snark concept. Keep in mind that a Hugo is a popularity contest, not necessary a metric of literary worth. Anyone have a comparable list of Nebula winners handy?

Year	Book	Author	Read it?	Commentary
2005	Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke	No
2004	Paladin of Souls	Lois McMaster Bujold	No	On my TBR list
2003	Hominids	Robert J. Sawyer	No
2002	American Gods	Neil Gaiman	Yes	This is a good book, in the "Wow, Neil is doing a really good Tim Powers act" sense. I don't dislike him for that but I wish Powers got more recognition for some of his works.
2001	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	J. K. Rowling	No	Not unless someone pays me.
2000	A Deepness in the Sky	Vernor Vinge	No	will probably read it at some point
1999	To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	No	Another 'maybe'. I keep wanting to like Willis' writing more, based on liking her talks at cons, and failing.
1998	Forever Peace	Joe Haldeman	No	I'll have to read this eventually but Forever War disturbed me for so long after reading it that I'm actively afraid of picking this one up. It's comparable to how I couldn't watch Kurosawa films for several years after seeing Kagemusha.
1997	Blue Mars	Kim Stanley Robinson	Yes	I found the Mars trilogy spectacularly unmemorable; thought the California trilogy was better.
1996	The Diamond Age	Neal Stephenson	Yes	Dr M wrote: "It's a good thing that endings are apparently not a requirement for a Hugo", which is true - remember it's a popularity contest. The first 80% of the book is brilliant and a must-read for anyone who cares about how children are educated.
1995	Mirror Dance	Lois McMaster Bujold	Yes	I like all of the Vor novels.
1994	Green Mars	Kim Stanley Robinson	Yes
1993	Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	Yes	Another of the "I really should like this more than I do" books.
1993	A Fire Upon the Deep	Vernor Vinge	No
1992	Barrayar	Lois McMaster Bujold	Yes
1991	The Vor Game	Lois McMaster Bujold	Yes
1990	Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Yes	A book ruined for me by realizing it has a GAPING hole it its central plot logic.
1989	Cyteen	C. J. Cherryh	No
1988	The Uplift War	David Brin	No	I've never felt Brin was actually writing the kind of adult fiction I wanted to read.
1987	Speaker for the Dead	Orson Scott Card	*	Godawful. Gave up about 1/4 through. See below.
1986	Ender's Game	Orson Scott Card	Yes	There was a really good short story here, once. Then it got blown up into a couple of ponderous and boring novels. And I learned too much about the author to enjoy anything he wrote, like EVER.
1985	Neuromancer	William Gibson	Yes	Gibson is actually a better read at short story length but this is still an amazing novel and puts a lot of its contemporaries to shame.
1984	Startide Rising	David Brin	*	Bo-ring. When you're reading stuff like Neuromancer and being blown away by it, it's things like Brin that suffer by comparison.
1983	Foundation's Edge	Isaac Asimov	No	It might be good. Or I might decide that I really want to hold onto my memories of being riveted by the original Foundation books and not read an aging author's attempt to stretch it just one more book.
1982	Downbelow Station	C. J. Cherryh	*	Another one I tried and just couldn't get into. For me it really pales in comparison with Cherryh's Chanur trilogy, which are smaller, faster, and MUCH more interesting books.
1981	The Snow Queen	Joan D. Vinge	No
1980	The Fountains of Paradise	Arthur C. Clarke	No
1979	Dreamsnake	Vonda N. McIntyre	No
1978	Gateway	Frederik Pohl	Yes	Good space opera of the kind I used to enjoy.
1977	Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang	Kate Wilhelm	No
1976	The Forever War	Joe Haldeman	Yes	A frightening book, which is part of its brilliance.
1975	The Dispossessed	Ursula K. Le Guin	Yes
1974	Rendezvous with Rama	Arthur C. Clarke	No
1973	The Gods Themselves	Isaac Asimov	Yes
1972	To Your Scattered Bodies Go	Philip José Farmer	No
1971	Ringworld	Larry Niven	Yes
1970	The Left Hand of Darkness	Ursula K. Le Guin	Yes
1969	Stand on Zanzibar	John Brunner	Yes
1968	Lord of Light	Roger Zelazny	Yes
1967	The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes	One of my favorite Heinleins, for all its flaws.
1966	Dune	Frank Herbert	Yes	The spice is life; the endless raft of sequels is death.
1966	...And Call Me Conrad (This Immortal)	Roger Zelazny	No
1965	The Wanderer	Fritz Leiber	No
1964	Here Gather the Stars (Way Station)	Clifford D. Simak	No
1963	The Man in the High Castle	Philip K. Dick	Yes	F'ing brilliant, as with much of Dick's work.
1962	Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes	I still use 'grok' in casual conversation. I are a geek.
1961	A Canticle for Leibowitz	Walter M. Miller, Jr	Yes	Another disturbing and brilliant work.
1960	Starship Troopers	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes	Such a good book that I will forever hate Verhoeven for birthing that abomination of a movie with the same name.
1959	A Case of Conscience	James Blish	Yes*	One of the few books that has so aggravated me I've flung it away in anger. Not that it's not well-written, I just wanted to choke the characters to death.
1958	The Big Time	Fritz Leiber	No
1956	Double Star	Robert A. Heinlein	Yes	Not one of his better books.
1955	They'd Rather Be Right (The Forever Machine)	Mark Clifton & Frank Riley	No
1953	The Demolished Man	Alfred Bester	Yes	I agree that The Stars My Destination is better, but this is not a bad book.

So that's 27 yes, 22 no, and 3 failed-to-finish.

Comments

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that a Hugo is a popularity contest, not necessary a metric of literary worth.

I'm not sure I believe in any other assessment of literary worth, other than that people read a work, and enjoy it.

I say assessment rather than metric, because I'm also not sure I believe in ANY metric of literary worth; I think "literary worth" is a reification of a multi-factorial space including personal pleasure, cultural influence and relevance, complicated academic one-up-manship games, the self-reinforcing influence of the canon, and probably bunches of other crap.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Oh, as if the Nebulas aren't a popularity contest as well (just with a different populace).

I'm probably going to do this meme soon as well.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

(And I've probably started, but failed to finish, as many books on the list as I've actually read.)

[mangosteen]

What did you find so frightening about The Forever War. I'm afraid I didn't get much out of it beyond "well, that's a clever spin on a time plot."

[ckd]

I'd recommend reading A Fire Upon the Deep before A Deepness in the Sky, despite the latter being first in internal chronology.

[ian-gunn.livejournal.com]

I second recommendations for these two books. I agree with the order to read them as well. Reading them in the order written vs. chronologically usually seems better to me.

[ian-gunn.livejournal.com]

This is referring to A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Forever Peace, while continuing Haldeman's favorite theme of looking a little too deeply into some of the darker aspects of the human psyche, isn't the same world as Forever War, and unlike much else of his work, offers some interesting solutions. It's one I was willing to read more than once.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that you would describe the Chanur books as "smaller, faster, and MUCH more interesting books." Only The Pride of Chanur was smaller and things in The Kif Strike Back and Chanur's Homecoming move very slowly for most of the first book (the two were actually written as a single book, the story is that Donald Wolheim himself took a letter opener and stuck it into the manuscript saying "Cut it here." and so they did). And while I find the alien society building that she does there interesting, I've always found what she does with human society to be much more interesting.

I will admit that it took me two attempts at Downbelow before I was able to get into it, but once I got past a certain point, the events and their consequences just piled on and it was a non-stop roller-coaster ride for me.

In both cases, the action comes as the consequences of the choices made during the "slow" section of the book(s) come home to roost and new choices are made with shorter-term consequences and everything starts to pile up.

I will say that Cyteen is very worth while, both to see the "other side" of the Union/Alliance dispute and for the questions that are raised in the book.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

I third the motion. But I also found A Deepness in the Sky way too grim. Well written, but the stuff of nightmares, in large part.

Asimov Sequels

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

As for Foundation's Edge, I have decidedly ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, Asimov fended off requests to continue the Foundation series for decades, finally re-read his own stuff and when he got to the end of Second Foundation, he just about screamed, "I left it off there?!". He also did an admirable job of applying modern concepts of limits to the notion of the psychohistorical formulae, and acknowledged that any such social engineering would have to be continually monitored.

On the other hand, I find that I cannot remember a single character or scene from the book.

Asimov was definitely a 20th-century writer. His I, Robot and Foundation stories took the notion of orderly rules and constructs and showed how they could break. When Lorenz, Feinman, et al managed to prove that chaos is more than just noise, Asimov was both vindicated and effectively put out to pasture.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Cyteen gave me nightmares for weeks. It was a decade before I could bring myself to try Cherryh again and discover that the Chanur books are very good.

Re: Asimov Sequels

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Asimov was a good writer who wrote two books 200 times each. I've very glad to have read both of them.

Ender's Game

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

It's in my top five of books I've ever read. Sadly, the sequels went downhill exponentially from there, and I will never forgive Card for retroactively deconstructing Ender and destroying one of my few heroes.

Card is an astonishing good and bad writer by turns. He's rather like the Hulk at bat. Most of the time he misses, but if he actually connects, it's out of the park.

[drwex]

You're right, but due to the tighter nature of that crowd you'll find a MUCH larger percentage of the voters having actually read all the nominated entries, as opposed to one or two and voting on name popularity (*coughharrypottercough*) rather than actual opinions of the works they read.

[drwex]

I would say that there are some good metrics of worth in that books can have purposes and can achieve or fail those to greater or lesser degrees. We might also sketch some general metrics for "why have literature at all" including "to entertain", "to educate", "to challenge" and note that many (most) books fail on most (all) these general metrics as well. Those that do succeed are, imo, more worthwhile, given that I have only limited time to read.

[drwex]

Its inside-out look at war, the effects on people. It's a bit like Heart of Darkness except that at the time I related to it on a much more personal level. It's an illustration for me of how much more powerful the written word + reader's imagination can be than the visual image. I found Apocalypse Now roughly similar, but much less affecting, as it was _those_ images rather than what my mind conjured up. My brain is a fairly scary place.

[drwex]

Ah, I've always found Cherryh's aliens more convincing than her humans. And you're right, I never did try Downbelow a second time. I don't have the books to hand, but I recall Downbelow as being a massive volume whereas all three of the Chanur books clocked in below 350 pages. Might have to go back and recheck that.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

I suspect that when I get home and do the "look at the spins on the shelf" thing, Downbelow will be slimmer than Homecoming.

And I do think you would enjoy the questions raised (but very definitely not answered) by Cyteen, though I will also acknowledge that gentlescholar's reaction is pretty well justified.

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

I've read most of the Ender - sequels (free mind you, after a certain point - I would not pay for a Card book) and ugh. I remember reading Ender's Game (and The Postman) as short stories and found it AMAZING: when stretched to Novel legnth - they were diminished.
The Ender Series - ugh ugh ugh.
Enders Game - wonderful. Battle school was as true a depiction of how children act as any I've seen. Speaker, awful. Xenocide - very good - but you could tell that the author at some point just fell in love with his own voice - more than the story he was telling. Which is to say - It could have been shorter and still been effectvie, but I think he was having alot of fun 'messing with the minds of his readers'.
Most of the rest of the sequels - are excretable. The book about Bean - (Ender's Shadow) had some good bits - but slogging threw the rest of the book was *painful*. The human society he constructed would have fallen apart long before - the stories setting. Bean ranged from a great charector to absurd. And he destroyed Ender as a charector. ...
Ok, this turned out a great deal longer than I intended. I'll stop now.

Re: Asimov Sequels

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Then you missed Nightfall.

(Admittedly, that was a short story.)

Oh, and my favorite Engineer vs. Scientist story, The Billiard Ball.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll defend J.K. Rowling's writing and the Harry Potter series, even as I won't defend their fans.

In particular, Goblet of Fire (the one which actually won a Hugo) was a definite turning point in the literature world, let alone in the Fantasy/Science Fiction world. People never lined up outside of bookstores for Saul Bellow, after all. As finger-pointers decried "Why can't Johnny read?", Johnny was forking over $25 for an eight-hundred page tome.

Which he then read in one night.

Rowling's writing is engaging, insightful, and an excellent description of the mind of someone plowing thru adolescence.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell would never have been written, let alone found a publisher, if it weren't for Rowling's opera.

That said, you're probably correct about Nebula voters having read all the nominees.

[drwex]

The Hugo is not an award for getting children to read. Children who otherwise would not read anything have been reading science fiction for decades. By that criterion Jane Yolen should be rolling in Hugos. SF con-going parents (the Hugo voters) are not the ones complaining about why their Johnnys can't read. My point is that people voted for a Harry Potter book mostly on a name and popularity basis. Which is understandable since the Hugos are a popularity contest.