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A review by markyon
An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton
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.