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souloftherose's review
4.0
As the title suggests, an informal look at the Hugo awards from 1953 through to 2000. The contents of this book were originally published as part of a series of articles on Tor.com (and are still available in that format: https://www.tor.com/features/series/revisiting-the-hugos/). Having read a similar collection of Jo Walton’s essays before ([b:What Makes This Book So Great|17910076|What Makes This Book So Great|Jo Walton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1370009391s/17910076.jpg|25095529]) I was expecting this to be interesting and readable and it didn’t disappoint. Rather than reading or rereading all the shortlisted works Walton considers whether or not she’s read them before (she’s a very prolific reader and seems to have read a lot of them before) and if not, why not. She also comments on which books the Hugos may have missed by looking at other books published that year or shortlisted for the other awards. Walton’s focus is mainly on the novels although she does list the shortlisted works for the other categories, but also included in the book are interesting comments from other people made on the original web-published articles which include a wealth of information about the short fiction shortlisted each year. This was one of the highlights of the book for me and really emphasised how little I know about sff short fiction published more than a few years ago and how many well-known sff authors started out writing shorter fiction before novels (G. R. R. Martin’s name comes up a lot).
My only criticisms are that an appendix listing all the award nominations and index listing all the works mentioned (perhaps sorted by publication date) would have been really nice. And I was also sad to see that Jo made very few references to non-American awards when looking at books the Hugos might have missed. I suppose it makes sense given that the Hugo awards are effectively American awards but I still would have liked this.
My only criticisms are that an appendix listing all the award nominations and index listing all the works mentioned (perhaps sorted by publication date) would have been really nice. And I was also sad to see that Jo made very few references to non-American awards when looking at books the Hugos might have missed. I suppose it makes sense given that the Hugo awards are effectively American awards but I still would have liked this.
nineteen_adze's review against another edition
4.0
This is a serious brick; I’ve been chipping away at it since early April. It’s put together with an amazing level of detail, and I’d absolutely recommend it as the first stop for someone looking to put together an SFF history course or a book club of great shorter work from different decades. Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton left a lot of insightful comments on things that were left out of the finalist lists over the years, and the commentary on older short stories and novelettes that didn't make the ballot is fantastic.
If you’re not focused on learning more about the history of the genre or adding to your TBR of the best-reviewed classics, on the other hand, this isn’t going to be your cup of tea. My attention definitely flagged when I tried to read more than two years at a time, or when there was a span of years without the great concluding essays about one of the finalists. More years have those essays than not, but it was rough to hit too many sections that feel like lists without more reflection to break it up sometimes.
To access the core year-by-year material online, check out the Tor.com series. For the essays on the individual books, check out the Jo Walton Reads tag (her monthly reading lists are also delightful).
If you’re not focused on learning more about the history of the genre or adding to your TBR of the best-reviewed classics, on the other hand, this isn’t going to be your cup of tea. My attention definitely flagged when I tried to read more than two years at a time, or when there was a span of years without the great concluding essays about one of the finalists. More years have those essays than not, but it was rough to hit too many sections that feel like lists without more reflection to break it up sometimes.
To access the core year-by-year material online, check out the Tor.com series. For the essays on the individual books, check out the Jo Walton Reads tag (her monthly reading lists are also delightful).
bookaneer's review against another edition
4.0
I am not sure how I should rate this book considering I skimmed maybe 20% of it (I'll explain why). This book is a compilation of Walton’s articles in Tor.com and she included some of the comments made by mostly the influencers in the genre, editors like Rich Horton, James Nicoll, the late Gardner Dozois etc. It reads to me like a Goodreads forum with the more SFional knowledgeable members commenting on a thread about Hugo nominations. I should also say members who have followed the genre development since the 1950s.
Of course in Walton’s own commentary and the included comments there were A LOT of titles mentioned. Most of them, especially the ones before 1990s, were not recognizable by yours truly except household names who are still widely read today like Le Guin, Butler, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, you know the rest. She also put some essays about the winners but since they are spoilery I skipped/skimmed some of them which books I have not read.
Still there were lots of interesting points. I did not know File770 was more than 30 years old. I did not know Ted Chiang was already a big deal in 1992 when he won the Campbell (now Astounding) Award and in the previous year also was nominated for Tower of Babylon. I did not know No Award was a thing even in the 1950s. I did not know there was a Best All Time Series category once (which is back now, I suppose).
Another thing I found interesting is the quote from Peter Graham: The Golden Age of SF is when you were twelve. I am pretty excited to know that the Mars trilogy, A Fire Upon the Deep, Parable of the Sower, and Ted Chiang's first nominated stories was my golden age of SF, as well as A Game of Thrones (though it’s technically not SF). I guess I need continue the Mars trilogy and also try some Nancy Kress.
I enjoyed Walton’s frank opinion. She complained about lots of things, like cyberpunk (she really hates it), Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books (understandable), some of the award categories (that keeps changing sometimes in a bizarre direction – like, what the fudge is Best Ad?), and of course the works that should have won or nominated. I just laughed when she dubbed the best semiprozine category as ‘the Best Locus’ category. She has this hilarious streak of zingers that got me chuckled lots of times.
Last but not remotely least, she included winners from other major awards in her opinions, from the Nebulas to the PKD, World Fantasy and also Tiptree awards (now Otherwise) so that's helpful.
Eh, it seems I did enjoy this book quite immensely and I did purchase two Cherryh books while reading it due to Walton’s almost feverish promotion, so four stars it is.
Of course in Walton’s own commentary and the included comments there were A LOT of titles mentioned. Most of them, especially the ones before 1990s, were not recognizable by yours truly except household names who are still widely read today like Le Guin, Butler, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, you know the rest. She also put some essays about the winners but since they are spoilery I skipped/skimmed some of them which books I have not read.
Still there were lots of interesting points. I did not know File770 was more than 30 years old. I did not know Ted Chiang was already a big deal in 1992 when he won the Campbell (now Astounding) Award and in the previous year also was nominated for Tower of Babylon. I did not know No Award was a thing even in the 1950s. I did not know there was a Best All Time Series category once (which is back now, I suppose).
Another thing I found interesting is the quote from Peter Graham: The Golden Age of SF is when you were twelve. I am pretty excited to know that the Mars trilogy, A Fire Upon the Deep, Parable of the Sower, and Ted Chiang's first nominated stories was my golden age of SF, as well as A Game of Thrones (though it’s technically not SF). I guess I need continue the Mars trilogy and also try some Nancy Kress.
I enjoyed Walton’s frank opinion. She complained about lots of things, like cyberpunk (she really hates it), Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books (understandable), some of the award categories (that keeps changing sometimes in a bizarre direction – like, what the fudge is Best Ad?), and of course the works that should have won or nominated. I just laughed when she dubbed the best semiprozine category as ‘the Best Locus’ category. She has this hilarious streak of zingers that got me chuckled lots of times.
Last but not remotely least, she included winners from other major awards in her opinions, from the Nebulas to the PKD, World Fantasy and also Tiptree awards (now Otherwise) so that's helpful.
Eh, it seems I did enjoy this book quite immensely and I did purchase two Cherryh books while reading it due to Walton’s almost feverish promotion, so four stars it is.
fluffdragon's review
4.0
3.5 rounded up. An interesting survey of the first (approx) 50 years of the Hugo Awards, where they . A finalist in Best Related work, where (only having assessed half the category so far!) it's gonna probably not do well v. the two nontraditional entries at least (Best Related Works is so broad!). Still worth reading if you want an idea of late 20th century SFF
markyon's review
4.0
So, this is one I’ve been meaning to get to for a while since it was published last July, around the time of the Hugo Worldcon. (I know, I’ve been busy.)
As most of you reading this will know, the Hugo Awards have been awarded, almost annually, since 1953. The Hugos are voted for by fans, unlike the Nebula Awards, which are voted for by the Writers of Science Fiction in America. (That process is more like the Oscar voting than the Hugos are.) When I was younger, they were seen by many readers and writers, along with the professional Nebula Award, as the benchmark of good SF & Fantasy – especially SF.
This was to such an extent that the mere mentioning of the phrases “Hugo Award Winner” or even “Hugo Award Nominee” were for me often an enticement to read or buy a book. (I did once try to read them all, scouring second-hand bookshops and libraries for as many as I could get. However, as this was in the days before the internet, I was defeated by the numbers of those not in print - and the follies of the so-called New Wave, which at that time I hated. I’m more appreciative these days.)
The idea of this book is simple. The book goes through, year by year from 1953 to 2000, the nominees and winners of the main Awards. In each year Jo comments on the books that won (or didn’t!), pointing out other books that were eligible (and should have been nominated) and in her chatty way passes judgement on what did, could or should have won that year. The book also lists other non-textual categories, such as the Dramatic Presentation nominations, Best Artist and the John W. Campbell Award nominees for each year, but these receive few comments. This is mainly about the written word – novel, novella, novelette, short story, magazine and fanzine.
She explains her reasons for looking at the novels at the start of the book:
Jo looks at the books from the following perspectives – is the book still in print and still in the library (the library in Montreal as well as in English ones), is it still discussed (showing its longevity). Unusually Jo freely admits that she is not an expert and that she has not read every book or every story, which is quite engaging. But she is clearly a fan.
In some cases, where Jo has read the book, there are more detailed reviews, such as on Heinlein’s Double Star (one of her favourites) Arthur C Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book or Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. If you have read any of Jo’s reviews in her companion collection, What Makes this Book Great, you know what to expect.
As this was something that was initially developed as blog posts from 2010 – 2013 on the Tor.com website, there are also included selected comments made by a number of readers, particularly Rich Horton and the sadly missed David Hartwell and Gardner Dozois, which add other perspectives to Jo’s admittedly personal views. What surprised me most is how much Rich Horton adds to the posts through his comments, adding many more novels, novellas and short stories to read. (My own personal reading list has grown exponentially as a result.) Jo has said that should this book be updated from 2001 to the present day then Rich Horton would be the logical choice to do so. I can only agree.
There are some good points made by all concerned. Whilst the quality of the nominees and winners of the Best Novel flow and ebb from year to year (and part of the fun of the book is reading what was nominated and what should have been nominated), the Novellas in the 1970’s and 80’s are consistently good, in the contributor’s opinions.
Jo does debunk the myth that of the two ‘main’ Awards, the Hugo is the ‘populist’ Award and the Nebulas are more ‘literary’. Where the two awards diverge, and certainly in the 1970’s and 80’s, the Nebulas seem to have more of the books now recognised as classics whilst the Hugo novel winners are more… quirky.
This reminds us that all Awards are not isolated, but subject to trends of the time. This book shows the evolution of the Awards and the genre, reflecting the views of the fans who voted at the time, even if it is only to disagree with them! As such, for anyone interested in the development of the Award up to 2000, it is a worthwhile read. (But be warned – sometimes there ain’t no folk stranger than SF folk!)
What was fascinating to me was that by reading the nominees and winners in consecutive order, it is clear how some authors blaze a trail across the categories for a while before fading away to near nothing. I was very pleased to read of names I liked but now obscure. (I must write about Hilbert Schenck at some point.) There were other trends too - the rise of Larry Niven in his early years is really noticeable and the phenomenon and impact of John Varley in the 1970’s is palpable, for example.
As this is an ‘informal’ history, there are clear favourite authors and non-favourites which are freely admitted by the contributors. Most noticeable is the consistent love of Theodore Sturgeon and Gene Wolfe’s work throughout. However Jo is not a fan of everything and everyone. She admits that she is not a fan of anything cyberpunk, Dan Simmons’s later Hyperion books and Philip K Dick’s writing to the point where she has avoided his work, including the 1963 Award Winner The Man in the High Castle. Although she is often an advocate of Heinlein’s work (such as Double Star), she is less enamoured with the more famous Stranger in A Strange Land (rather like myself, actually.)
Of course, you could just read the posts online (as I did first time around!) but there’s something to be said for having them all in one handy place. My only problem is that with minor revisions, such as the long-lost nominees for the Hugo of 1956 to keep the book current, the book ends in 2000, after which Jo feels unable to make comment on. (She has herself become a Hugo nominee and winner in 2012.) She explains this as follows:
As a slight downside, some readers may be disconcerted, even annoyed, to find some of the availability details a little out of date. There are a number of books that are claimed to be unavailable or out of print, and they may have been in the USA in 2010, but there are quite a few that I know were available in the UK at the time of writing or have become available since 2013. In these days of globalisation, it might have been helpful if these had been revised for 2018, although readers with easy access to the Internet and websites such as the mega-bookseller named after a South American river, for example, will find many of them relatively easy to obtain.
Although the book is focused mainly on the Hugos, we also see, as time goes on, the addition of other Awards as the genre expands - the Nebula Awards (from 1966), the Locus Awards (from 1971), the Mythopoeic Awards (from 1971) and the World Fantasy Award (from 1975), all of which add something to the culture of the genre but in my opinion dilute the impact of the Hugos. Jo adds these other Awards to each year for comparison with the Hugos, broadening the list of potential reads but at the same time providing us perhaps with too many choices. The result of these additions are long lists of stuff to look at without too many comments, which makes understanding why they are worth reading more difficult to comprehend.
However, this book is more than just a booklist of possible reads. Above all, it is an engagingly personal trawl through a list, by a fan, with all of the quirks and limitations that creates.
Despite my minor niggles, I enjoyed reading this a lot. Although I would not recommend reading too much in one go, as the style can become repetitive, this is a great “dip-into” type of book. If you want to read each year consecutively and then go and read some of the nominees, this is a great primer, not only for the winners but also for some of those who didn’t quite make it. Here it has made me want to reread A Canticle for Liebowitz, The Peace War and Startide Rising amongst many others, and read Tea With the Black Dragon, The Lathe of Heaven and Dying Inside, which I have never read.
Alternatively, if you want to look up specific years – who were the nominees and winners in the year you were born, for example? – this is a lovely summary. (For the record, mine were Way Station by Clifford D. Simak and No Truce With Kings by Poul Anderson, with Analog the Best Magazine. For what such an opinion is worth, I am pleased by that list. I want to read both again.)
In short, this is a book for those who, like me, love the Hugos or indeed any other Award that celebrates the genre – the Awards and the ceremonies, the good, the bad, and the sheer razzmatazz of it all, even now.* I spent a very happy time reading it, but perhaps more importantly it made me want to read books I haven’t read and reread ones I have. It is a celebration of books and the genre by a fan and should be appreciated by anyone who loves the genre like Jo – and I – do. For all the good and bad, for all of the hullaballoo, it is ours and deserves appreciation. Recommended.
*Announced for the reasons of clarity - I was very happy and humbled to play my own small part in being one of a group who were nominated for the Best Fanzine as Galactic Journey in 2018.
As most of you reading this will know, the Hugo Awards have been awarded, almost annually, since 1953. The Hugos are voted for by fans, unlike the Nebula Awards, which are voted for by the Writers of Science Fiction in America. (That process is more like the Oscar voting than the Hugos are.) When I was younger, they were seen by many readers and writers, along with the professional Nebula Award, as the benchmark of good SF & Fantasy – especially SF.
This was to such an extent that the mere mentioning of the phrases “Hugo Award Winner” or even “Hugo Award Nominee” were for me often an enticement to read or buy a book. (I did once try to read them all, scouring second-hand bookshops and libraries for as many as I could get. However, as this was in the days before the internet, I was defeated by the numbers of those not in print - and the follies of the so-called New Wave, which at that time I hated. I’m more appreciative these days.)
The idea of this book is simple. The book goes through, year by year from 1953 to 2000, the nominees and winners of the main Awards. In each year Jo comments on the books that won (or didn’t!), pointing out other books that were eligible (and should have been nominated) and in her chatty way passes judgement on what did, could or should have won that year. The book also lists other non-textual categories, such as the Dramatic Presentation nominations, Best Artist and the John W. Campbell Award nominees for each year, but these receive few comments. This is mainly about the written word – novel, novella, novelette, short story, magazine and fanzine.
She explains her reasons for looking at the novels at the start of the book:
“I don’t think the best novel always wins. I think it’s very hard to say what the best book of the year is. Most years, there’s no single obvious best. It’s much easier to say what the top five are. I thought it might be interesting to take a historical look at the individual years and consider what was nominated and what won, to look at what else could have been nominated and wasn’t, and how well the selected books have stood the test of time. I wanted to look at the nominees to see whether the Hugos were picking the best five books, not only at the winners. It’s easy to find consideration of Hugo winners. I wanted to do something different—to revisit the winners and nominees in context.”
Jo looks at the books from the following perspectives – is the book still in print and still in the library (the library in Montreal as well as in English ones), is it still discussed (showing its longevity). Unusually Jo freely admits that she is not an expert and that she has not read every book or every story, which is quite engaging. But she is clearly a fan.
In some cases, where Jo has read the book, there are more detailed reviews, such as on Heinlein’s Double Star (one of her favourites) Arthur C Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book or Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. If you have read any of Jo’s reviews in her companion collection, What Makes this Book Great, you know what to expect.
As this was something that was initially developed as blog posts from 2010 – 2013 on the Tor.com website, there are also included selected comments made by a number of readers, particularly Rich Horton and the sadly missed David Hartwell and Gardner Dozois, which add other perspectives to Jo’s admittedly personal views. What surprised me most is how much Rich Horton adds to the posts through his comments, adding many more novels, novellas and short stories to read. (My own personal reading list has grown exponentially as a result.) Jo has said that should this book be updated from 2001 to the present day then Rich Horton would be the logical choice to do so. I can only agree.
There are some good points made by all concerned. Whilst the quality of the nominees and winners of the Best Novel flow and ebb from year to year (and part of the fun of the book is reading what was nominated and what should have been nominated), the Novellas in the 1970’s and 80’s are consistently good, in the contributor’s opinions.
Jo does debunk the myth that of the two ‘main’ Awards, the Hugo is the ‘populist’ Award and the Nebulas are more ‘literary’. Where the two awards diverge, and certainly in the 1970’s and 80’s, the Nebulas seem to have more of the books now recognised as classics whilst the Hugo novel winners are more… quirky.
This reminds us that all Awards are not isolated, but subject to trends of the time. This book shows the evolution of the Awards and the genre, reflecting the views of the fans who voted at the time, even if it is only to disagree with them! As such, for anyone interested in the development of the Award up to 2000, it is a worthwhile read. (But be warned – sometimes there ain’t no folk stranger than SF folk!)
What was fascinating to me was that by reading the nominees and winners in consecutive order, it is clear how some authors blaze a trail across the categories for a while before fading away to near nothing. I was very pleased to read of names I liked but now obscure. (I must write about Hilbert Schenck at some point.) There were other trends too - the rise of Larry Niven in his early years is really noticeable and the phenomenon and impact of John Varley in the 1970’s is palpable, for example.
As this is an ‘informal’ history, there are clear favourite authors and non-favourites which are freely admitted by the contributors. Most noticeable is the consistent love of Theodore Sturgeon and Gene Wolfe’s work throughout. However Jo is not a fan of everything and everyone. She admits that she is not a fan of anything cyberpunk, Dan Simmons’s later Hyperion books and Philip K Dick’s writing to the point where she has avoided his work, including the 1963 Award Winner The Man in the High Castle. Although she is often an advocate of Heinlein’s work (such as Double Star), she is less enamoured with the more famous Stranger in A Strange Land (rather like myself, actually.)
Of course, you could just read the posts online (as I did first time around!) but there’s something to be said for having them all in one handy place. My only problem is that with minor revisions, such as the long-lost nominees for the Hugo of 1956 to keep the book current, the book ends in 2000, after which Jo feels unable to make comment on. (She has herself become a Hugo nominee and winner in 2012.) She explains this as follows:
“I stopped in 2000 for three reasons. First, the ticking clock of the century seemed like a good end point. Second, it was ten years before the time when I began to write the posts, and it didn’t seem possible to have perspective on anything any closer to the present than that. If you’re considering whether a book from 1958 or 1978 has lasted, knowing it’s in print in 2010 is useful. This doesn’t work so well for a book from 1998, never mind 2008. Historical perspective takes time. The third reason was personal—I began to be published myself in 2000, and I didn’t want to either consider or not consider my own work in this context.”
As a slight downside, some readers may be disconcerted, even annoyed, to find some of the availability details a little out of date. There are a number of books that are claimed to be unavailable or out of print, and they may have been in the USA in 2010, but there are quite a few that I know were available in the UK at the time of writing or have become available since 2013. In these days of globalisation, it might have been helpful if these had been revised for 2018, although readers with easy access to the Internet and websites such as the mega-bookseller named after a South American river, for example, will find many of them relatively easy to obtain.
Although the book is focused mainly on the Hugos, we also see, as time goes on, the addition of other Awards as the genre expands - the Nebula Awards (from 1966), the Locus Awards (from 1971), the Mythopoeic Awards (from 1971) and the World Fantasy Award (from 1975), all of which add something to the culture of the genre but in my opinion dilute the impact of the Hugos. Jo adds these other Awards to each year for comparison with the Hugos, broadening the list of potential reads but at the same time providing us perhaps with too many choices. The result of these additions are long lists of stuff to look at without too many comments, which makes understanding why they are worth reading more difficult to comprehend.
However, this book is more than just a booklist of possible reads. Above all, it is an engagingly personal trawl through a list, by a fan, with all of the quirks and limitations that creates.
Despite my minor niggles, I enjoyed reading this a lot. Although I would not recommend reading too much in one go, as the style can become repetitive, this is a great “dip-into” type of book. If you want to read each year consecutively and then go and read some of the nominees, this is a great primer, not only for the winners but also for some of those who didn’t quite make it. Here it has made me want to reread A Canticle for Liebowitz, The Peace War and Startide Rising amongst many others, and read Tea With the Black Dragon, The Lathe of Heaven and Dying Inside, which I have never read.
Alternatively, if you want to look up specific years – who were the nominees and winners in the year you were born, for example? – this is a lovely summary. (For the record, mine were Way Station by Clifford D. Simak and No Truce With Kings by Poul Anderson, with Analog the Best Magazine. For what such an opinion is worth, I am pleased by that list. I want to read both again.)
In short, this is a book for those who, like me, love the Hugos or indeed any other Award that celebrates the genre – the Awards and the ceremonies, the good, the bad, and the sheer razzmatazz of it all, even now.* I spent a very happy time reading it, but perhaps more importantly it made me want to read books I haven’t read and reread ones I have. It is a celebration of books and the genre by a fan and should be appreciated by anyone who loves the genre like Jo – and I – do. For all the good and bad, for all of the hullaballoo, it is ours and deserves appreciation. Recommended.
*Announced for the reasons of clarity - I was very happy and humbled to play my own small part in being one of a group who were nominated for the Best Fanzine as Galactic Journey in 2018.
bowienerd_82's review
4.0
An insightful, entertaining, useful, and frequently funny history of the Hugos with Jo Walton (and friends). I've been reading a library copy, but I think I may need to buy a copy of my own, because this is such a great resource (particularly when it comes to novellas and short fic, which to be honest, I have not read nearly enough of).
Perhaps my favorite moment of the book came from the chapter on 1968:
James Davis Nicoll: "...in general, if you have to read just one book this year about futuristic hippies living in Greenwich Village who find themselves protecting Earth from malevolent space lobsters and their human quisling, read this one."
Gardner Dozois: "There's dozens of those! I get tired of them."
In short, this book is awesome.
Perhaps my favorite moment of the book came from the chapter on 1968:
James Davis Nicoll: "...in general, if you have to read just one book this year about futuristic hippies living in Greenwich Village who find themselves protecting Earth from malevolent space lobsters and their human quisling, read this one."
Gardner Dozois: "There's dozens of those! I get tired of them."
In short, this book is awesome.
colonel2sheds's review
3.0
I've read this twice now (first read it in its original form as a series of blog posts) and I imagine there will be a third? I like making lists and this book gives a lot of fodder for list making. However, both times I become frustrated and anxious to be done by the second half as Walton's and my tastes don't overlap that much. Definitely interesting to see the path the Hugo's took in those first 47 years and fun to make lists of all the things I want to read.
tashalostinbooks's review against another edition
3.0
A little bit of a dry read, but added more to my TBR.
erin_boyington's review
3.0
Just as with ‘What Makes This Book So Great,’ there’s an overwhelming number of good old books to track down. There are also many MANY long lists of titles with zero context, which I find less useful. But maybe someday I’ll be as well-read as Walton and her commenters....
All I have to add is thank God for interlibrary loan!
All I have to add is thank God for interlibrary loan!