A review by souloftherose
An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton

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.